ISAAC
by Tetsuwan Penguin
Summary: In this sequel to my #119 story, Atom and the super computer known as Issac once again find themselves pitted against the mob who are looking to steal US military secrets. Atom's new siblings also find themselves involved, and we meet a boy genius who hacks his way into the think-tank, as well as the robot Atlas. This is yet another of my original head canon stories set in N.Y.C.
1. Introduction

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 _Author's Note:  
_ _My very first five Astro fan fiction stories were set in a universe of my own making. These stories were written a few years ago, and they are still up on this site if anybody wants to go read them for the first time._

 _I had invented a new set of characters and set the stories in New York City rather than in Japan. Atom became a real robot in the real world and Tezuka's manga faded into the background as a fiction that was known to the characters in my stories. (In fact Tezuka himself was in the first story which actually began prior to the start of the second world war)._

 _One of the most unusual characters in this series of stories wasn't even a corporal being, but rather a disembodied intelligence. Isaac was a computer program who looked after Atom and the other characters. I'll now bring him back for another go._

 _This first chapter will sum up the events that have happened since we last left Atom and company at the end of #119 ….._

* * *

 ** _Introduction_**

 **The** hacker knew he was on to something by the level of security that he had to breach to get as far as he did. For every level closer to the core of this network he got the more he was challenged and misdirected. At first he'd tried to crack his way into the U.S. military's secret laboratory, and buried deep within their layers of encryption and aliases, he'd found a well hidden link to a site he'd yet to figure out. It did seem to have many hidden storage vaults, very possibly full of wonderful secrets. The hacker had so far managed to avoid the numerous honey pots scattered about the domain, which only whetted his appetite. He looked out the window to realize from the growing deep ruby color at the horizon that he'd spent yet another full night absorbed in the pursuit. He sighed and saved his work on a flash drive before shutting down the computer. With any luck he might be able to get a few hours sleep before he'd have to leave for school. Good thing there was plenty of 'Red Bull' in the 'fridge for breakfast.

* * *

 **Uran** yawned and looked out the window of her bedroom. The sun had just started to peek above the horizon and the sparrows in the tree just under her window were happily chirping loudly to greet the new day. She opened the window and poked her head out to get a better view. Two younger birds who had just learned how to fly saw her and flew up to land on the top of her head. "Well good morning to you!", Uran smiled, reaching up with her hands as the sparrows gladly perched upon her index fingers. She walked over to her dresser where the birds hopped from her hands to the top of a mirror sitting there. Uran bent over to open the bottom drawer where she had hidden a few slices of stale bread. She grabbed one of them and crumbled it up in her hands and offered the bread crumbs to her guests. The two sparrows sat on her wrist and began to peck at the food.

"That tickles!" Uran laughed as she watched the birds eat their fill. Suddenly, the mother bird in the tree below began to chip loudly, and the two nestlings flew from Uran's hand towards the window.

"See you tomorrow!" Uran laughed, as she wrapped the remaining bread up in the paper sack and hid it in the bottom dresser drawer again.

 **Cobalt** and Atom shared a bed in the middle bedroom of the apartment. The room used to be a den, but after Uran and Cobalt had joined the Yamamoto family Sachiko had decided that her new daughter needed her own room and Atom was moved out of the empty bedroom to share the den with his new brother. Of course it meant that Sachiko lost her sewing room, and Ken'ichi had lost his hobby room, for that was how the couple had been using the den. Neither of them minded, they now shared a small table they had moved into the corner of the master bedroom for their recreational activities.

Cobalt looked to be a year or two older than Atom. He had been rescued from the military about the same time that Dr. Tenamann had built Uran as prototype for a Japanese project to supply home care robots for that countries aging population. Officially Uran was on 'loan' to the Yamamotos for 'evaluation', but there was no doubt of the fact that she was now part of Atom's family. Both Cobalt and Uran had been programmed by Tenamann and computer expert Robert Levinson to be siblings to Atom, and perfect offspring for the aging couple fostering them.

Atom now appeared to be a normal 13 year old male child, just entering puberty. Uran was built in the image of an 8 year old girl, while Cobalt who was almost a head taller than his brother, appeared to be in his mid teens. Cobalt and Atom shared many abilities in common. Both had tremendous strength capable of 100,000 horse power, and the ability to fly using ionic jet engines in their legs, Cobalt also had such engines in his arms as well. While the older looking boy lacked his younger brother's arm laser, he did have the ability to generate huge electrical discharges from the spikes of his 'hair'. Both robot boys had super hearing, and the ability to see in near darkness. Both also had powerful searchlights built into their eyes. All of that hardware had been developed for the military, a role that Ken'ichi was glad they were not now serving.

* * *

 **Robert Levinson** entered his computer lab holding a one pint coffee mug filled to the brim with Starbucks java in his right hand and a large gaming style laptop tucked under his left arm, while he kicked the door open with his left foot. The room lights came on automatically as he entered, Bob set the heavy computer down on the desk while swallowing a large gulp of the still hot beverage. Other than the sound of a gentle breeze coming out of the air conditioner vents in the ceiling, and a soft whine of the fans cooling the electronics in the computer racks, the noise level in the room was rather low, quiet enough in fact for the 60hz buzz of the ballast transformers in the overhead florescent fixtures to be audible.

Bob opened the clamshell case of his custom portable computer and the machine exited the sleep mode that it had been in since Robert had left his apartment to commute to work on his electric bicycle. Levinson's apartment in the loft of a converted 19th century warehouse building several miles in the downtown direction from the Museum building was an easy summer's commute by 'cycle, but when the weather was less suitable for such transportation Bob would resort to the 8th Avenue subway.

He fished a mouse out of his upper desk drawer and plugged it into the computer just as the machine had automatically connected to the WIFI. The first order of business was to check his email which was only a few mouse clicks away.

"My, you're quiet today," Bob voiced, apparently to nobody.

"Hello Bob," came the reply from a disembodied electronic sounding voice with just a hint of a British accent.

"Good, Morning Issac." Bob said without taking his eyes off of the computer screen. "What took you? You usually show your ugly face on my laptop just as soon as it boots."

Isaac was a computer program that lived in the various computers making up the laboratory network. He'd originally started out many years ago as a simple daemon which replaced the background shell of Bob's primary computer. Isaac had been an intelligent user interface that could interact with a human on a verbal level using both speech synthesis and voice recognition. He'd grown far beyond that, and was now a networked entity living in the internet. Most of his functions still resided in the various mainframe computers in the lower level of the complex deep beneath the American Museum of Natural History, but when necessary Isaac could spread his tendrils into computers all over the world.

"We've had an uninvited guest again overnight," Isaac replied. "I've been keeping him busy."

"Were you able to locate him?" Bob asked.

"I have a pretty good idea where he is," Issac replied. "Crafty little stinker, seems to know where we've planted the honey pots and other booby traps. His IP spoofing is pretty good, and it seems he wants us to think that he's either in China or Korea."

"Nothing new there." Bob laughed. "Well just keep an eye out for him and guard the family jewels."

"Of course." Isaac replied. "Anything else?"

Bob quickly paged though the overnight email backlog. "I've got a few projects ready to start up, but I need to do some more reading of the requirements documents. I'll get with you after lunch on that."

"Sure thing Robert." Isaac answered, "By the way, I've just detected Mr. Green's automobile pulling into his parking spot."

"Thanks for the warning," Levinson laughed. "Talk to you later."

 **Simon Green** stepped out of his Tesla Model X sedan and walked toward the elevator. The sleek gull wing doored vehicle was an early beta prototype that Elon Musk had personally delivered to the head of the secret think tank. Simon and Elon had been on a first name basis ever since the incident at the ISS where Atom had rode one of the first Dragon space ships up to orbit after the station had been damaged by debris from an exploded Russian cold war weapons platform.

Hidden in the corner of the Museum's parking garage was what looked like an electrical closet, but was really the doorway to a high speed elevator that went downward to the subterranean headquarters of one of the most secret think tanks in the country.

The facility was actually built in the early 20th century with funds contributed by various industrialists who were worried about the possible rise to power of unfriendly forces in Europe and Asia. Their fears were well founded as the events leading up to the second world war well illustrated. Over the years the think tank had served many different purposes, today it was a civilian run organization doing mostly theoretical research with some of the most powerful computers on the planet. Its RAD and EMP hardened interior housed a data store larger than what was available to the Pentagon or Area 51. There were also facilities for the prototyping of all sorts of mechanical and electrical innovations, though most of those were now little used since the man who had been in charge of that sector had resigned from the think tank.

 **While Dr. Albert Tenamann** had handed in his resignation and had 'retired' to live in Japan, his presence in the think tank was still noticed. Most of the current facility had been designed with his input, and under his direction. He often teleconferenced with Bob and Simon when his expertise was required on a current problem.

The laboratory at the lowest level of the complex had been Tenamann's domain, it was here that the boy super robot, Atom, had been designed and constructed. Tenamann had been working on a military android soldier when enemy agents tried to steal the design by kidnapping him or his son Adam. While Adam lay in a coma following a traffic accident which was the result of the boy trying to escape from capture by those after his father, Albert destroyed the original military android prototype in a fit of rage. Then he redirected his anger by reconstructing that prototype to resemble his dying son. The resulting robot had its electronic brain loaded with Adam's mind dump, and the result was Atom. Happily, Adam eventually recovered thanks to the skill of an unorthodox surgeon from Japan. Adam and his father then left the US to live in Japan where Albert now works on robotics at the Japanese Ministry of Science.

* * *

 **Ken'ichi** and Sachiko Yamamoto were drinking their morning tea when Uran made it into the kitchen, followed by Atom and Cobalt.

"Ohayō," Sachiko smiled upon seeing the three robotic children enter the room.

"Ohayō," they replied while taking seats at the table.

Sachiko got up and opened the refrigerator to remove a pitcher containing an oil-water mixture that the three of them drank for cooling and lubrication. Being robots they didn't require human food, but they were able to digest it in small amounts. Atom had long ago developed a fondness for pizza, something that was beginning to rub off on Cobalt. Uran would have none of that, but she did love to slowly melt chocolate in her mouth, something her foster mother readily understood.

Atom gulped down his glass of oil and water, and then quickly donned his backpack. It was a school day and he never wanted to be late. Uran and Cobalt had the additional requirement of refueling themselves. While Atom was now powered by a vacuum energy canister that in theory would never run out, his siblings still used the Helium2 fuel that he had originally been powered by. Their fuel cartridges had to be replenished periodically. Each of those was the size of one of those old fashioned CO2 cartridges that had been used in BB guns and quart sized soda makers. Uran and Cobalt helped each other install a new fuel cell before they headed towards the door to join their brother.

 **Each** of the three siblings were in different schools and grades, Atom was in his last year at David A. Boody middle school while Cobalt was attending Lincoln High School. Uran was in th PS216 elementary school. Atom's identity as a robot had been a secret until the previous year when had become a national hero by saving the astronauts up on the International Space Station. It hadn't made a difference at school, Atom's friends quickly accepted him for what he was and still liked him as much as before. Uran and Cobalt had no difficulty being accepted in their school environments either, Atom had paved the way for them.

 **Ken'ichi** Yamamoto had a light class load that morning and didn't head off to work until after his adopted children had left for school. Ken'ichi was a professor at the Polytechnic Institutes's Brooklyn campus on Jay Street. He walked towards McDonald Avenue where he boarded the "F" train of the IND subway. The line was elevated at this point and ran through half of Brooklyn before submerging under the streets at Church Avenue. The line again became elevated briefly to cross the Gowanus Canal before reaching the Jay Street station where Professor Yamamoto got off. Ken'ichi rather enjoyed the subway trip to the Institute every day. The El offered a wonder view of the borough, and while crossing over the canal one could see the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

* * *

 **Cora Smith** had a crush on Atom ever since the first day she'd bumped into him on the boy's first day at school. Of course Mike Finkle the class bully had a hand in that too. Atom had stood up to the brute who was a good head taller than him to protect Cora. Then there had come the day when Finkle had snuck up to the roof of Cora's apartment building when she was sunbathing topless up there. Mike chased her around and she slipped on a slippery patch of wet asphalt and fell over the low knee wall on the edge of the roof.

With his sharp hearing, Atom heard her cries for help from several blocks away from inside his bedroom facing Cora's building. The boy robot flew the short distance at supersonic speed, blasting out of his bedroom window like a shell from a 24 inch naval cannon. Atom caught Cora in midair and gently returned her to the roof. There was no hiding what he was from the girl however. Cora didn't care if Atom was a robot, at that point she'd have loved him even if he was a Martian.

Cora's dad was a motorman for the New York City Transit system, usually assigned to the "N" or "D" lines. She loved riding in the motorman's cab with her dad, especially during the run over the Manhattan Bridge. It took great skill to handle a fully loaded ten car train over the steep incline of the century old suspension span, and Cora was proud of her father's ability to control the subway train crossing the bridge.

Cora waved to Atom as the two of them entered the school building and went their separate ways to their home rooms. She knew that he would be waiting by the exit to walk her home at the end of the school day, as he always did.

* * *

 **Cobalt** had been built by the military at a secret base deep under the Cheyenne mountains. He was built from the very same design that Albert Tenamann had used for Atom, but he'd been scaled up a bit to look like a recruit fresh out of high school. Cobalt's A.I. had been modified several times since Poindexter Drake had attempted to activate him using code stolen from one of Isaac's honey pots. For a brief while his electronic brain held Isaac's own persona, but shortly before he'd been given to the the Yamamotos as a big brother to Atom, Albert Tenamann and Bob Levinson had replaced that with a unique Kokoro. Atom suspected that his creator had made a copy of his own mind as the basis for Cobalt's current personally. It made sense because his older brother was certainly brilliant.

Cobalt was, in fact, at the top of his class at Lincoln H.S. Mr. Issacson, the head of the physics and science departments, had already told him that he expected him to be admitted easily to M.I.T. if he chose to go there. Cobalt was on the debating team, the chess club, and he was the president of the Astronomy club. He sometimes hung out in the Physics laboratory prep room with Mr. Williams where he helped keep the supplies in order. The cigar smoking old man who loved Beethoven, but hated Lenard Bernstein, often teased Cobalt by telling 'robot' jokes behind his back, not realizing that the boy's ears were super sharp and he heard everything the old man said. Cobalt didn't care, he wasn't offended by anything and actually thought the old man was funny.

 **Uran** had been designed to be a health care support robot, in the form of a pre-adolescent child. Albert Tenamann had programmed her to be both a sister to Atom, and a daughter to Sachiko Yamamoto, taking some of Sachiko's brain patterns as a basis for her A.I. Uran was a tomboy, and not afraid of very much. She also loved animals, and even had the ability to understand them, and make herself understood by them. Birds would fly down from the trees to roost on her fingers at her command, and ferocious dogs would walk up to her with their tails wagging. She was even able to hand feed lions at the zoo (which nearly gave the zoo keeper a heart attack the first time she tried that!)

She now happily bounded up the steps of public school 216 and followed the crowd of other students on the way toward her class room.

* * *

 **Bob Levinson** finished off the last cold dregs of his morning coffee just as his desk phone began to buzz. "That would be Simon asking to see you in his office," Isaac's electronic voice replied in a subdued northern London accent.

"Thank's Isaac," Bob laughed as he left the laboratory without answering the phone.

Simon looked up when he heard the soft knock on his door. "Good morning Bob," he deadpanned, "How did you know I wanted to see you, you never picked up the phone?"

"Isaac clued me in." Robert replied.

"Yes, I should have guessed that. Take a seat, we have a guest this morning."

Bob had already noticed the gentlemen in the blue Air Force uniform sitting on the right hand side of his supervisor. He bit his lip to hold back anything that he was inclined to say out of habit and simply nodded to the General as he took the chair on the left side of Simon's desk.

"General Hayes has a new project for us," Simon explained.

The two star General smiled and got up from his seat and walked towards Robert. "Good morning Mr. Levinson," General Hayes said, offering his had to Robert to shake.

Bob ignored the General's out stretched hand and merely gave him a sloppy salute. "Good morning sir," he replied.

Hayes ignored Robert's gestures and turned his gaze toward Simon. "I'm here because we have need of Mr. Levinson's services, or rather those of his alter ego."

"Who?" Simon asked.

"I assume you are referring to Isaac," Levinson stated.

"Yes, your cybernetic disembodied spirit," the General continued. "It seems that the Air Force has given up on the idea of building robot soldiers to take over the duties of our enlisted men. It's actually cheaper to simply put some A.I. into our existing hardware. The problem of course, is to develop a suitable self aware intelligence. It occurred to me that several good examples of such already exist, and your Isaac is probably the most advanced of them all. We'd like you to adapt Isaac to serve our requirements. At this very moment we have several drone fighter aircraft being converted to suit a prototype for this very purpose. How soon can you be ready to work on it?"

Bob hesitated for a moment, shifting his gaze between Simon and the General. Finally, he spoke.

"I'll need to look over your requirements specifications, the hardware manuals for the aircraft control interfaces, and then consult with Isaac to get his recommendations," Bob explained. "I can start on that as soon as you get me the required information."

"Excellent!", General Hayes exclaimed. "I've anticipated your response and you should have everything that you need within the hour."

With that, the General picked let himself out of the office, closing the door behind him slowly.

"Thank's for keeping a civil tongue," Simon sighed. "I know there has been some bad blood between the General and us."

"That's putting in mildly," Bob huffed. "I'm not sure who put him up to the idea of using Isaac's A.I. as a basis for his drone project, but I'm actually glad to do it."

"You surprise me," Simon said, "I was sure that you'd be against militarizing Isaac."

"You're right, the thought does rub me the wrong way," Bob agreed, "However I'd much rather have Isaac behind the trigger of a fleet of attack aircraft than something another one of their brainless hackers might dream up. We don't need a bunch of terminators flying over us!"

"Yeah, I see your point," Simon laughed.


	2. One

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 _One_

 **Robert Levinson** was about one third of the way through the initial specifications document that General Hayes had delivered by a bounded courier to the think tank facilities. The documents were sealed in several nested containers, the first being a common wooden crate, the inner most one being made of aircraft grade titanium with an electronic lock that would only respond to Bob's thumb print to open.

"Why didn't they just scan these things and email them over the secure server?" Simon gasped when he saw the bound volumes sitting on Robert's desk, along with the several kilo's of packing material.

"I can understand their paranoia about these documents getting hacked out of their computers," Bob said, "but surely they realize that we are quite secure here."

"Maybe not." Simon replied. "So how goes the reading?"

"I still have the bulk of their specifications to read though, and then there are all of the technical documents on the F-35 Aircraft that we will be using as the test bed," Robert replied. "The Air Force will be receiving the bulk of their version of the F-35 aircraft sometime next year, we'll actually be doing the first tests on the X-35 prototypes, and depending on how well the A.I. adaptation goes along there is still time to make some small changes in the aircraft that are slated for production before Q3 of next year. I've had some of these documents scanned so Isaac can digest them, he'll be able to analyze the data faster than I can."

"Don't let the General know you've done that," Simon laughed, "He might blow a gasket to know that those hard copy documents were transcribed into digital format."

"Yeah, right." Bob agreed.

 **Isaac's** face slowly materialized on the 3D monitor hanging from the middle of the laboratory. The Holographic display used tricolored lasers scanning though a fine vapor mist that was contained within an electrostatic field. The display was one of Robert's latest innovations, which Simon had commented looked like something right out of the 'Wizard of Oz'.

"Hello Bob," Isaac's electronic voice spoke, "I've finished analyzing the data that you asked me to process."

"How does it look?" Robert asked.

"Surprisingly good, actually," Isaac remarked, "Though there are some necessary changes that will have to be made to the electronic package that the Air Force has designed. The biggest problem is the size of the computer package they've used, it's far from being powerful enough to house my A.I., at least in its current state."

"Actually I was afraid of that." Robert sighed. "We can use a wide band wireless network to connect an auxiliary processor with the test aircraft and only put as much of the system as we can fit in the on board processors."

"Yes that would be enough of a stop gap measure to demonstrate what we will be capable of doing," Isaac agreed, "But I would not recommend actually using such a system in combat."

"Why not," Bob questioned, "The Air Force is currently controlling drones by encrypted remote systems with human pilots."

"True, but that isn't what they've specified in the design documents," Isaac replied.

"Right," Bob nodded. "Well, I'll have to see about getting us some upgraded computer hardware."

"What ever happened to those quantum processors that your friends over at IBM had developed?" Isaac asked.

"I'd have thought you'd know the answer to that, Isaac," Bob sighed.

"Yes I do," Isaac replied.

Several years ago the Skunkworks over at IBM had been experimenting with what was supposed to have been a major advancement in computing power. They'd managed to develop a room temperature superconducting semiconductor that made use of the polystatic properties of quantum logic to cram several orders of magnitude greater switching speeds and logic gate complexity into a processor module no larger than the silicon that now powered most laptop computers. However only a few working prototypes were ever produced, as the discovery had proved to be an accident which the engineers had never been able to duplicate. Shortly after the first prototype had been lent to Robert for experimenting the laboratory where it had been produced was destroyed in a fire of suspicious origin, and Dr. Verostic, the IBM engineer who had developed them had vanished without a trace.

One of those processors now resided inside of the body of a robot who resembled a 13 year old boy. A second prototype, one with nearly twice the power of the first had been used by the military in a similar robot that was made in the form of a slightly older human male. Robert had thought that there were one or two more of the super computer modules in existence, however their locations were a mystery.

"I've been searching for the whereabouts of Dr. Verostic and the missing prototypes without any luck," Isaac agreed, "There is one thing we could try, at least if he is willing."

"That would serve us well for a demonstration, but we'd still need to be able to reverse engineer the processor and produce more of them," Bob sighed, "My friends over at IBM have told me that they've abandoned the facility that produced those prototypes after the fire Even if Dr. Verostic were to be located, we'd still have to start over from scratch."

* * *

 **Dr. Albert Tenamann** sat in a small, cluttered office at his desk, eating a bowl of Ramen noodles with a pair of plain bamboo chopsticks. He'd been serving as the head of the Ministry of Science's robotics department for almost two years now, ever since he'd returned to Japan with his ailing mother who wanted to live out the remainder of her life with her childhood Japanese friends who had returned to their mother country sometime after the end of the second world war.

Albert had accepted the post at the ministry shortly after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The engineers at the power plant had put out a call for help when they realized that many of the critical cooling valves were stuck in the wrong position and there was no way to get at them without sending men inside the plant on a suicide mission to save the reactors from a total meltdown. Honda's Asimo robot was the most advanced humanoid robot at the time, and it was not up to the task. In the end Atom had flown from NYC to Japan and crawled inside the damaged facility to prevent an even worse catastrophe. While the officials agreed to keep Atom a secret from the new media, the Ministry of Science demanded that Atom's creator be put in charge of their robotics research, even if he was an American. Albert was given the nickname, "Tenma Hakase" among his co-workers.

So far his team had been devoting themselves to the task of creating health care robots for Japan's aging population. Their first efforts had resulted in several prototypes in the form of 7 to 9 year old children capable of performing most of the household chores that an elderly person might require in a live at home situation. One of those prototypes was now in America, programmed as a sister to Atom, she had been named Uran.

 **Albert** finished his simple lunch just as the phone rang. He fished the cellphone from his rear pocket and smiled to see Robert Levinson's face on the screen. "Ohayō," he said out of habit, realizing that it was probably early in the evening on the other side of the world. "It's been a while since we last spoke, Bob. What's up?"

"General Disaster has given us a new project," Bob laughed. "I'm supposed to cram Isaac's A.I. into a fleet of drone fighters, but it seems that we're coming up a bit short on the computer horsepower. I sure wish we had some more of those quantum processors we used on Atom."

"I thought that your friends over at the IBM skunkworks had managed to solve the production issues," Albert replied. "I never would have thought that the one we got hold of for Atom was the only one ever made."

"Actually, it wasn't." Bob replied, "I know of at least one more, but it's in currently in use. IBM never did get more than a handful of working units completed, the research lab burned down in a fire of suspicious origin. Isaac is searching for Dr. Andy Verostic who was the principle designer of the quantum CPU, but he's vanished without a trace."

"I assume you're going to ask me what we are using over here in our robots." Albert said. "Uran has one of our most advanced A.I. enabled miniature mainframes as her electronic brain, but it has only a fraction of the CPU power that Atom's does. It serves her well enough to house her A.I., she only has to perform at the level of a seven year old child, remember. We aren't working on any robots that require more powerful A.I.'s than that. I can send you some of our hardware if it will serve your needs."

"Thanks Albert," Bob replied, "but we probably have computer modules at least as capable here. What we need is something a few orders of magnitude better."

"That's what I expected." Albert sighed. "The Ministry is working on our own quantum processor, but we're still a few years away from a working prototype."

"That's OK." Bob replied. "I do have an ace in the hole, at least for our first prototype. I've already started putting out feelers to my skunkwork friends asking them to get ready for a reverse engineering job."

"Well good luck pal!" Albert answered.

Bob closed the connection on his end just as Isaac's image materialized inside of the 3D monitor.

"I think I may have a lead on Dr. Verostic," the Daemon said.

"That's good news." Bob said.

"Maybe." Isaac replied. "Mind you I haven't exactly located him, but I have run across some interesting bits and pieces on the network that seem to belong to him. It doesn't yet make much sense though."

"What do you mean?" Bob replied.

"Give me a few more days to do some more searching," Isaac continued, "If I'm right we may require Atom's help on this one."

* * *

" **Gee Atom,"** Cobalt queried, "What do the guy's over at the think tank want with me?"

"I'm not sure bro," Atom replied, "all I know is that Isaac contacted me via the cyber link we share, and he asked me to come over to the museum complex and to bring you along as well."

"Well couldn't we just have flown over there?" Cobalt asked.

"Sure, but I think we should try to act like normal human people in the city," Atom replied, "Unless it's an emergency of course."

"Yeah, I guess so," Cobalt said bending over to stare down the length of the tunnel. "It's just that I don't like the subway that much, too dirty and noisy if you ask me."

The two robot boys were standing on the north end of Jay Street station waiting for the uptown 8th Avenue train to pull in to the station on the inside track. Atom looked down the tracks at the south end of the tunnel but didn't yet see the telltale glow of a trains approaching headlamps. He cupped his hands over his ears and increased his hearing gain by 1000 times, and then heard the rumble of traction motors. "I think our train just left the previous station," he told his brother, "It will be here any moment now."

Sure enough, a slight breeze began to blow out of the south end of the tunnel, and the glow of headlamps reflected off of the polished surface of the rails. Finally the uptown 'A' train entered the station and they both got into the first car.

"You still like looking out the front door, don't you?" Cobalt said.

"Yeah, I guess that is a bit of a weakness on my part," Atom laughed, "I like to imagine myself as the motorman driving the train."

Cobalt took a seat near the front of the car and looked up at his brother who was happily staring out the front window of the train at the darkness of the tunnel in front of them. At 59th Street, they got out and waited for the uptown local which would stop at the 81st Museum of Natural History station. Atom lead the way into the Museum basement and the hidden doorway leading to the elevator down to the hidden facilities.

As they entered the complex Simon Green was waiting for them.

"Hello boys!", Simon smiled. "Robert is waiting for you guys in the computer complex, Atom I assume you still remember the way."

"Sure," Atom laughed, "Follow me, Coby!"

As soon as the two of them entered the large computer center they spotted Isaac's glowing image hanging from the ceiling in the very middle of the room.

"Wow, you've changed Isaac!" Atom laughed.

"Yes, that 3D monitor is a new addition to the laboratory," Bob replied as he walked towards the boys. "Isaac wanted a more personal way of interacting with me without being confined to a physical body. This holographic display is neat, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Atom replied as he walked around the glowing mist contained in the monitor's electrostatic field.

"Ah, Cobalt!" Isaac smiled, "Good of you to come. We've got a bit of a favor to ask of you."

"Me?" Cobalt queried, pointing his right hand index finger at himself.

"Yes." Bob replied. "Cobalt, how would you like to become a fighter pilot?"


	3. Two

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 _Two_

 **Simon Green** drove the Tesla model X SUV down the NJ turnpike southbound. Robert Levinson sat next to him up front, while Atom and Cobalt were in the row of seats behind them. After taking his exit off of the highway, he used the high tech car's built in GPS navigation system to guide him down a few poorly marked secondary roads leading towards the McGuire-Dix-Lakehusrst military base.

"Isn't this the place where the Hindenburg crashed and burned?" Cobalt asked as they entered the though the front gate.

"You know your history." Simon laughed, as he showed the guard the IDs that the General had issued him. He was directed towards a parking spot and the four of them got out. They were greeted by a young woman with short cut blond hair wearing a Major's uniform, who lead them over to a hangar where a single shiny new aircraft was being worked on by several mechanics.

"General Hayes instructed me to show you the aircraft that you will be using for your tests," she said. "If you need any help, just have me paged."

"Thank you," Simon answered.

Cobalt was already walking around the X-35 fighter, admiring it. "I'm going to fly this thing?" he asked.

"Not exactly," Bob replied. "I'm sorry I've kept the details of this project from you, but I wasn't exactly sure how to explain it so I thought showing you the aircraft might be the best first step."

"OK," Cobalt replied. "I can see that this is a single seat fighter. It has advanced stealth capability, supersonic flight, probably up to Mach 1.5 at least. It looks like the perfect test platform for developing a robotic A.I. fighter that would not require a human in the cockpit."

"Has Isaac already explained this to you, Cobalt?" Bob asked.

"No," Cobalt replied. "I'm only guessing here."

"Robots don't guess," Bob laughed, "They analyze the facts and put together a logical conclusion."

"Isn't that what humans call guessing?" Cobalt replied.

"Maybe." Bob said. "OK Cobalt, let me lay all the cards out on the table. The Air Force has asked me to adapt Isaac's A.I. for the purpose of piloting a drone fighter aircraft. The F-35 next generation fighter will be the testbed for this purpose, and since the Air Force isn't going to get any of these new planes until sometime next year we are using the experimental prototypes that were built for the project approval phase. I've already determined just how much computational power will be required for the on board systems, and it seems that we're going to come up short. At the moment there are only two miniaturized processors on the planet powerful enough for the job, though I hope to obtain additional units eventually."

"You mean the quantum computer modules that Cobalt and I have in our electronic brains?" Atom asked.

"Yes," Bob replied, "Though technically only Cobalt's is fast enough. You see Atom, when Albert built you he used the very first prototype quantum processor module that IBM's skunkworks produced. They eventually made several more before the laboratory was destroyed in a fire that had all the telltale signs of arson. When we built you General Hayes must have know about it, because he had a spy planted and had a copy of all of your parts made for himself."

"That was me." Cobalt spoke up.

"Yes, it was." Bob said. "The General had the wonks at IBM deliver him one of the last of those prototype quantum computer modules, one that had quite a bit more qubits of logic that yours, Atom."

"That's why Cobalt is so much smarter than I am?" Atom asked.

"I'm not sure that's the right way to say it, but yes," Bob laughed. "I guess if you were Sherlock, Cobalt would be Mycroft."

"So Atom's electronic brain isn't up to the task, but mine is." Cobalt said.

"Yes." Bob answered. "What I'm asking here Cobalt, is for you to lend me your electronic brain. We will install it into the aircraft, and wire it up to the flight control systems. You'll still be there, but I will also download Isaac's A.I. along side of yours. The two of you will be going along for the ride. Isaac will do the actual flying, but you'll be monitoring everything and acting as a backup. I know it's a lot to ask of you. I can't force you to do it, and I won't be mad at you if you turn me down."

Cobalt glanced at Atom and then took another walk around the X-35 fighter.

Atom walked around the aircraft toward his brother, the two of them were now hidden from Robert and Simon's view by the X-35. "Hey Cobalt," Atom laughed, "You know something? I'm Jealous!"

"You mean you'd do it if it were you?" Cobalt asked.

"I wouldn't even give it a seconds thought before saying yes!" Atom replied.

" Yeah, that's what I thought you'd say," Cobalt replied. "You know, I think it would be kinda fun!"

The two robot boys walked back to where Bob was standing. Cobalt suddenly stuck out his right arm and gave Bob a 'thumb's up' sign. "When do we start?" he asked.

* * *

 **Poindexter Drake** flipped the visor of his welder's helmet up and put down the glowing electrodes that he'd been using on the frame of the robot.

"How much longer?"

Drake turned around to face the door of his workshop where a short statued heavy set man with a face like a bulldog and a fat cigar smoldering between his teeth stood there glaring at him.

"Well?" he asked again.

"It's on schedule." Drake answered. "I still might have to scrap it and start over, but the guys over at DARPA did have a good design to start with.

The man spat out his cigar and ground it out on the floor with his right foot. He walked over to the work bench and slowly circled it as he studied the robot Drake was working on.

"This doesn't look like that Atlas prototype."

"Not anymore." Drake replied. "DARPA had those guys over at Boston Robotics develop several prototypes, the one your associates walked off with was the third of the four versions. What you see here is way beyond it. Don't forget, I've been inside of the Cheyenne mountain skunkworks, I've seen the impossible."

"So this thing is going to be able to take on that Atom robot?"

"Atlas here is going to be able to tear him apart!" Drake laughed. "Ever since Tenamann and Levinson embarrassed me, and that tin horn general had me fired I've been looking for my revenge. Payback has been a long time coming, but Atlas here is going to get it for me. Now have you been able to hold up your end of the deal?"

"Of course!," the fat man laughed. "I've had your computer expert on ice for some time. After we walked off with the remaining prototypes and I set that fire, I had him convinced that he was working on some top secret project for the government, something on the order of the Manhattan project."

"Excellent!" Drake cackled.

* * *

 **Cobalt** lay on the padded workbench in the computer lab. He seemed a bit ticklish as Bob connected the various cables up to him to download his memory contents to the mainframe.

"The first thing I'm going to do is to back up your entire system in duplicate to my secure storage facilities," Bob explained. "Don't want to take any chances of loosing your kokoro should anything go wrong during the transfer of your processor to the the aircraft, and then during the symbiotic connection with Isaac's A.I."

"That sounds like a good idea," Cobalt replied.

"Now just relax and let the mainframe do its thing," Bob explained,

"You're probably going to have a weird out of body experience while this is going on," Atom told Cobalt.

"You mean like the time I played the violin for the first time and melted down that Beelzebub deamon?", his brother queried.

"Something like that," Atom laughed. "I guess I tried to forget about that adventure.

Cobalt tried to relax. He closed his eyes and he felt a bit of a tinkling sensation as Bob activated the network connections between him and the laboratory computer network. With his eyes closed, Cobalt began to see a gray mist surround him. As the background grew brighter he was aware of being in the middle of a vast open area with a horizon that seemed to extend to infinity. He was lying on a soft white cushioned cot that resembled the furniture often found in a psychiatrist's office. A gentlemen in a pure white laboratory coat with many pockets approached him. The man had a full head of pure white hair, and a matching mustache and beard. He spoke in a accent that one would expect to hear somewhere in the northern part of the city of London.

"Hello Cobalt," the man said. "Don't try to get up, at least not yet. You still have to adjust to cyberspace."

"That is you Issac, isn't it?" Cobalt smiled.

"Correct," the man replied.

"You look different than you do on the monitor," Cobalt exclaimed.

"This is one of my many possible cyberspace images," Isaac replied, "This is how I like to appear to Atom whenever the two of us meet on the digital landscape."

Cobalt raised his head to look around. He slowly slid his legs over the side of the cot and placed them on the ground, which despite its cloud like appearance, felt quite solid.

"Let me give you a hand," Isaac said, "You may find yourself a bit unstable on your feet until you get used to the landscape here."

Isaac gripped Cobalt's right hand in his his and placed his left hand on Cobalt's waist as Atom's brother transferred his weight to his feet.

"I think I'm OK now, thank you," Cobalt said as he looked around him. "Cyber space sorta looks a bit like heaven," he said.

"I tried to make it look pleasant," Isaac said, "You do remember that the last time we met on the digital plane things were a bit beastly to say the least! I did leave out the angelic voices and the harps, that would have been a bit too much, I suppose."

"I guess so," Cobalt replied, before he realized that Issac was joking with him. "What's happening now?" he asked.

"Our minds are merging," Isaac told him. "Soon I will be part of you, and you part of me. We will see though the same set of eyes and feel the same sensations. My image will change into that of a combat pilot, and your image will fade away, It may be a bit disturbing to you when your electronic brain is removed from you body, but Bob will leave it powered up during the transference to the aircraft, so the experience won't be any worse than what you are feeling now."

"I hope so." Cobalt sighed. He felt a slight tingle in his hands and when he held them up to his face he noticed that they were becoming transparent.

"It's begun," Isaac told him. "Perhaps you should lie back down on the cot while the operation is completed."

"I think that might be a good idea," Cobalt said, as he jumped back up onto the cot and lay down.

* * *

 **Andrew Verostic** removed his thick wire frame glasses and carefully cleaned the lenses. He used one of the many foil wrapped alcohol soaked cleaning sheets that he kept in his pockets, wiping each lens on both sides exactly 22 times before replacing the heavy frames back on his face and balling the cleaning cloth up in his right hand and then depositing it in the waste basket. He performed this ritual once or twice each hour as he couldn't stand the slightest imperfection in his field of view.

"You should have gotten yourself contacts, you know that?" Rocco told him.

Andy ignored the ugly mans comment, fanning the air around him to disperse his cigar smoke. He coughed and muttered a reply, "I've told you before I can't think with your damn stogie smoldering away, the smoke and the stench gives me a headache! Just how badly do you want the quantum processor anyway?"

Rocco grumbled at the nerd, but he held back his anger and spat out the cigar and stomped it out on the floor with the ball of his left shoe. "Happy now?" he asked.

"Go open the windows and let the stench out." Verostic told him. "Then maybe I can get back to work."

As the short heavy set Italian opened the windows of the make shift laboratory, Andy pulled another lens cleaning packet from his pocket and proceeded to re-clean his glasses. Once he finished the ritual for a second time, he went back to his workstation computer and continued to inspect the 3 dimensional schematics of the hyper-cube matrix that made up the core of the quantum processor logic. He was now very close to re-creating the circuits that had been lost in the fire a year and a half ago.

Rocco was sick of babysitting the nerdy genius, but he needed the man to recreate the breakthrough that he had created in the now abandoned IBM skunkworks. The arson had been a big gamble, but it had been necessary. Only by stopping the project in its tracks and then taking possession of its creator could the syndicate have hoped to keep it off the market and control it for themselves. Fortunately, the genius that had been behind the greatest cybernetic discovery of the 21st century was a gullible, easy to control fool, who was only interested in his own work. Keeping him on ice had been the easy part, dealing with him without breaking his neck had been nearly impossible.

* * *

 **The hacker** grabbed a legal sized pad and sharpened his pencil. He started writing down the long strings of numbers that were slowly scrolling down the face of the computer monitor. It was easy enough to pick out the IPV4 and IPV6 address octets from the data stream, the hard part was weeding out the red hearings. He hit a few keys and his editor re-arranged the columns in a slightly different order. There! Now the with the data lined up a bit differently he could see where the messages were actually coming from. He jotted down a few more of the addresses onto the pad and paged through the network dump some more. It would take all night, but once he finished analyzing this last dump of the network traffic he'd managed to intercept he'd be able to rewrite his attack programs and try again. He was getting real close now, he could feel it.

* * *

 **Uran and Atom** stood on opposite sides of the padded table upon which lay Cobalt. "Is he dead?" Uran sighed.

"No, but his body is in suspended animation," Robert explained. I've removed his electronic brain, see?", he pointed to the 4x3" module sitting on a small circuit board card.

"There is a high capacity Lithium-Carbide battery on that module which will preserve the state of his mind until I can plug it into the aircraft's systems," Bob continued. "Once I do that Cobalt and Issac will be sharing an airplane as a body. Right now I'm going to put this module into the backplane of my mainframe network machine, watch!"

The two siblings followed Bob as he walked around to the back side of the room long mainframe and opened the rear door of one of the cabinets housing the computer's circuits. He pointed to an empty card socket where he gently shoved Cobalt's electronic brain module into.

"Now see what happens," he laughed.

The 3D monitor in the middle of the room came to life, and Cobalt's image slowly formed. The nerdy robot looked out from the middle of the ionized cloud of gas that was filled with laser light from a pair of high definition television cameras mounted above it. "Hi guys!" Cobalt replied. I can see you from inside of cyber space, can you see me?"

"Sure bro," Atom replied. "Are you getting used to it yet?"

"It's a bit weird for sure," Cobalt replied, "thou not as freaky as the first time I was there. But it has it's advantages. I can go anywhere I want just by thinking about it."

"Is Issac with you?" Atom asked.

"Somewheres." Cobalt replied. "He's busy studying the X-35 manual right now. I can see him in the back of my mind, or our minds that is."

"I haven't yet fully loaded Isaac's modified AI into your electronic brain yet, Cobalt," Robert said. "Right now I'm going to perform some diagnostics on it to make sure it survived being removed from your robot body."

"Hey you didn't tell me that something could go wrong!" Cobalt said with some worry.

"Nothing that I can't fix," Bob laughed. "I just want to make sure that all of the interfaces to the laboratory mainframe are correct before I try and download Isaac, that's all."

"Thanks, that makes me feel a whole lot better!" Cobalt laughed.


	4. Three

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 ** _Three_**

 **The** hacker felt proud of himself as he entered the last line of data into his program and typed 'make'. The complex script started running as all of the dependencies were scheduled to be built first, along with all of the libraries. The 14 year old boy yawned and decided to catch some sleep. It was now 4 o'clock in the morning and he did have school in a few hours. The program would take several hours to compile anyway, he wished he had a faster computer.

* * *

 **Robert's** legs, and part of his torso were visible sticking out of the access panel in the bottom of the X-35's fuselage, while the rest of him was jammed into the aircraft's electronics bay. Working in the tight quarters of the confined space was giving him claustrophobia, and he was sweating profusely. Finally as waves of panic rolled over him he pushed himself out of the hole and crawled out from under the aircraft.

"Done?" Simon asked.

"Almost," Bob replied. "Between my muscles cramping up, my eyes crossing on me, and the claustrophobia, I just had to bail out and get some fresh air."

Simon opened the ice chest he'd brought along and handed the computer expert a bottle of cold water from inside of it.

"Thank's, I needed that!" Bob laughed.

Atom stuck his head though the access panel that Robert had just escaped from. "I'm smaller than you and my hands more nimble," he said. "Maybe I could finish the work here?"

"Yeah, I bet you could at that," Bob replied. He spread the schematic diagram that he had brought with him out flat on the ground and showed it to the boy robot. "Here, study this wiring diagram. I've already marked in pencil the connections that I've finished."

Atom quickly scanned the diagram and memorized it. "Got it!" he smiled sticking his upper torso into the aircraft's electronics bay.

"You might need these," Bob said grabbing a pair of long nosed pliers, a wire stripper, and a few small screwdrivers; handing them to Atom.

It was dark inside the compartment but Atom's eyes were well suited for the task, equipped with low light cameras and built in illumination. Normally he'd have used the IR illumination, but as he needed good color rendition to identify the various cables he switched on the white search lamps located in the white areas of his eyes.

He worked quickly, following the wiring diagram that Bob had showed him. After ten minutes he had the last of the connections locked down. "Want to double check the wiring before powering it up?" He asked.

"Oh, I'm sure you've done it right, Atom," Bob laughed, "But yes I will give it a once over."

Atom slide himself out of the access panel. Bob grabbed his flashlight and stuck his head into the aircraft again and he quickly looked around. This time, with only his head inside the wiring bay he didn't get the sicking feeling from the confined space and was able to take his time checking all of the wiring. Finally, Bob dropped back to the ground.

"Looks perfect," he smiled. "Now we can power it up and let Isaac and Cobalt get the feel of her!"

* * *

" **Reno Felix Guzmán!"** The boy was jolted back to attention by the teacher's yelling of his name and the resulting laughter of his classmates.

"Yes?" he replied, sheepishly.

"Can you solve the problem on the board, young man?" Mr. Waxmann asked, for the second time.

Reno rubbed his eyes and looked up at the blackboard. "Sure, piece of cake!" he replied.

The teacher stuffed a stick of chalk into his hand and pushed him out of his seat. "Show us then!"

The boy marched defiantly towards the front of the classroom and quickly filled the blackboard with computations. He then tossed the chalk stick back in Mr. Waxmann's direction, "The problem actually has several solutions, but I only solved it for the most obvious one." Reno took his seat with a smug look on his face.

The teacher had a look on his face of someone that has just been 'had'. "Very good, Mr. Guzmán, your answer is correct," he said, "But I'd still appreciate your napping on your own time! Perhaps you should spend more of your nighttime in bed!"

* * *

 **Cobalt** woke up and looked around him. He was sitting inside of an airplane hangar. The large door of the building was open and though it he could see the taxiway, and beyond that the active runway of the Air Force base. He could feel the thunderous vibrations echoing throughout the the structure as an old F14 Tomcat took off with full afterburners on a training flight with some rookie pilot. He tried to move his arms and legs, but instead got the feedback from the X-35's fly by wire from the aircraft's ailerons, and elevators.

"Where am I?" he asked, a strange version of his voice coming out of the cockpit voice synthesizer.

"Good morning!" Robert laughed. "Well as I promised your electronic brain is now controlling the the systems of an X-35 next generation advanced fighter prototype aircraft."

"Where is Isaac?" Cobalt asked, "I thought that he was going to be running this show and I'd be just along for the ride?"

"Never fear, I am with you!" Isaac replied. Cobalt could hear his companions voice inside of his own thoughts, and perhaps through the cockpit voice synthesizer and microphones as well.

"I've grafted a copy of Isaac's A.I. on top of your own, Cobalt," Bob explained. "When he's performing the flight makeovers during the tests your motor interfaces will be off-line, but your sensory inputs will still be connected."

"Gee, don't I get a chance to fly this thing?" Cobalt wined.

"You can taxi us to the runway if you like," Isaac promised, "And if you're good, I'll give you some lessons and let you try some simple straight and level flight. I've already been though many hours of simulator practice, but you've never been behind the stick of an aircraft before."

"That's OK." Cobalt replied. "When do we start?"

"General Hayes will be here sometime after lunch," Bob replied. "Why don't the two of you entertain yourselves in cyberspace till then?"

* * *

 **The Wagner** apartment complex located east of First Avenue in the East Harlem neighborhood of upper Manhattan housed many families of Dominican descent. Manuel Guzmán, had emigrated from the Dominican Republic with his newborn son Reno shortly after his brother Alex had left to take a job in New York. Manuel's wife had died in childbirth, and he found it difficult to hold down a job and raise his son. Alex invited his brother to come live with him and his wife who were childless. The two bedroom apartment the two families shared in the Wagner house was crowded, but tidy.

All seemed to go well for them until the day that Alex's wife, pregnant with her first child went into labor. Alex was involved in an emergency where he worked so his brother Manuel took it upon himself to rush his sister-in-law to the hospital in the taxicab he drove for a living. A drunk driver on the East River Drive crashed though the center barrier and hit his his cab head on, killing Manuel and his sister-in-law instantly.

Alex nearly went insane after his wife's death. He started drinking and lost his job. The money he got from welfare and food stamps was barley enough to pay for housing and food for himself and his brother's son.

Manuel's now teenaged son Reno, already quite the computer nerd, handled his father's death by spending long hours at his computer hacking away. Despite the long sleepless hours he spent at the keyboard, Reno somehow managed to keep up his grades in school.

* * *

 **General Hayes** arrived at the flight line promptly at 1:10 PM. His Air Force blue staff car pulled up to the hangar and was parked along side of the X-35 jet, just as a small propane powered tow vehicle was being attached to the plane's nose gear.

"Sorry I'm a few minutes late," The General remarked, "There was a bit of a traffic jam on the NJTP."

Bob looked at his watch and laughed, "As far as I'm concerned you're right on time, Sir.", he said, giving the two star general a sloppy salute.

"Well, let's get this demonstration going then," Hayes remarked. "I have a meeting with my staff scheduled for later this afternoon, and I'd like to report some good news."

"I think we can accommodate you on both counts," Robert replied.

"Good afternoon General!" Isaac's voice said, coming from the cockpit voice synthesizer.

"Good afternoon to you too," Hayes replied, suddenly realizing that he was talking to an airplane.

"We're not going to do anything really advanced today," Bob explained to the General, "Just taxi to the runway, do a simple low performance takeoff, circle the field a few times and do a few low passes and some touch and goes, then land and taxi back to the hangar again."

"Sounds like stuff a green cadet would do on his first flight in a prop plane," the General huffed.

"True," Bob agreed. "But this is the first test of Isaac's A.I. in the cockpit, and my interfacing a quantum processor to the aircraft's control bus."

"Did you disable the cockpit controls?" the General asked.

"No, they are still functional," Bob replied, "I have a lock out switch installed in the aircraft, if you like we could put a pilot in there and in an emergency he could lock out Isaac and take control of the plane himself. But I assure you it won't be necessary."

"Maybe not," Hayes replied, "But I'd feel better with a pilot on board, even for no reason other than to monitor how well your A.I. performs from a pilots point of view."

"That isn't necessary sir, you can monitor the flight from the computer down link attached to the simulator." Bob replied.

"Even so, I've brought a pilot along with me," Hayes replied, waving at his staff car.

Sitting in the back seat was a young man who couldn't have been much past twenty years old. He was thin and still had acne as if he was just out of puberty. The cadet was wearing a light weight flight suit, and was holding a helmet and breathing mask.

"That's your pilot?" Bob laughed. "I though you'd have brought along some Chuck Yeager type, not a cadet still wet behind his ears."

"He'll do." the General replied. "Cadet Smith has several hundred hours logged in the simulator, and an equal amount in actual jets. He's soloed a long time ago."

Smith nervously climbed into the X-35's cockpit and strapped himself in. Behind his back, Cobalt and Isaac were laughing.

"Say Cobalt, you up to a little fun?" Isaac asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Let's see if we can get cadet Smith to lose his lunch," Isaac chuckled.

"Still want me to taxi out to the runway?" Cobalt asked.

"OH YES!" Isaac said, "And make sure you have a heavy hand on the throttle and the brakes!"

The ground crew detached the tow bar from the X-35 and the little tractor leaving the aircraft sitting on the tarmac in front of the hangar. Isaac went through the engine start procedure carefully by the book, and then handed the plane off to his co-pilot.

"OK Cobalt, we're cleared to taxi to the active." Isaac then brought up an image of the base map showing the route along the taxiway from the hangar to their assigned runway.

"No problem, I won't get lost." Cobalt replied as he revved up the engine.

As soon as he had full throttle, Cobalt took his 'foot' off the brake and the plane lunged forward. Cobalt immediately pounded the brake hard and yanked back on the throttle. He carefully repeated the actions, setting up a bouncing movement in the cockpit. Cadet smith would have been thrown out of the cockpit if he hadn't had his seat belt and shoulder harness fastened. As it was the belts dug into his flight suit and pinched him hard.

"OK, that's enough!" Isaac laughed, "I'll take over from here!"

The X-35 sat right behind the numbers on the active runway, waiting for the final clearance from the tower. As soon as they received permission to roll, Issac advanced the throttle. He kept the nose in a level attitude while the aircraft picked up speed, rolling along the runway.

"OK, hold onto you stomach!" Isaac warned Cobalt.

"I'm fine, you should have given our guest a bit of a warning though." Cobalt replied

"I'll let him figure it out!" Isaac said.

With almost all of the runway now behind them, Isaac went to full afterburners and pulled the nose up hard. The X-35 shot up in a maximum performance takeoff climbing like a bat out of hell at an 80 degree incline! Once in pattern level altitude, Isaac leveled out. Although his speed bleed off quickly, a short sonic boom hit the ground, and the rear window of the general's car exploded.

" **What the hell** is your A.I. doing?" General Hayes demanded. "You said a simple take off, not a max performance tear out at Mach One!"

"Ii think Isaac might be showing off a bit for the benefit of your pilot," Bob snickered.

"Just what I need, a plane with a sense of humor!" the General face palmed.


	5. Four

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 ** _Four_**

" **Hey RFG!,"** Juan Garcia said as he ran to catch up, "You really lucked out with Mr. Waxmann in math class today."

"Not really," Reno replied, shrugging his shoulders, "I already knew all that junk."

"How?" Juan asked.

"I had to learn it on my own for the computer stuff I'm working on," he replied.

"What stuff?" his friend asked.

"It's over your head, Juan," Reno laughed.

"Try me!" Juan demanded.

"Well it has to do with encryption theory," Reno explained. "I've been trying to hack into a certain computer network that one of my advanced search programs stumbled into. There seems to be some kind of, well alien cyber intelligence lurking behind this heavily fortified firewall. The site is surrounded with honey pots, and dead end back doors. Must be some kind of top secret government research outfit, I'm figuring."

"So why do you want to hack into there?" Juan questioned, "If a place like that catches you and figures out who and where you are, the FBI will throw you in jail, or maybe the CIA will secretly make you disappear!"

"You've been reading too many spy novels," Reno laughed at Juan. "I've almost cracked my way in, when I left for school this morning my latest attack program was still running. Maybe when I get home I'll discover I've gotten lucky this time."

"Well if you see a bunch of unmarked black cars parked in front of your house and some dudes dressed like MIB, you'd better sneak in by the back way." Juan suggested.

"I'll keep that in mind," Reno laughed as the two boys departed to go their separate ways home.

* * *

 **The X-35** aircraft made a low pass over the field in the inverted position, and then pulled into a vertical climb and rolled back into a normal flight configuration. Isaac slowed the plane down, lowered his landing gear and lined up with the runway for a touch and go. His rear wheels had just barely kissed the ground when he applied full throttle and pulled his nose up. He leveled off in traffic pattern altitude and made two circuits around the airfield before setting up for a second landing approach.

"That looks much better!" General Hayes said, slapping Bob on the back.

This time the X-35 settled down on the runway and the nose dropped allowing the front landing gear to roll along the tarmac. "OK, Cobalt," Isaac said, "You can taxi us back to the hangar now, only this time take it easy on Smitty there, I think his skin is turning green and we don't have any barf bags on board!"

Cobalt felt Isaac unlock his motor reflexes and he walked the aircraft onto the taxiway. This time he was gentle on the throttle and brakes. He did show off one little bit by waltzing past the tow tractor that was waiting to back the aircraft into the hanger. Instead, Cobalt drove the plane straight into the back of the building, locked the left brake solid, and gave the throttle a quick blast of power. The aircraft pirouetted around the left main gear, swinging its tail feathers about, nearly sideswiping the General's car, as he made a tight one-eighty turn to park the X-35 with its nose pointing at the hangar door.

"Nice!" Isaac laughed.

* * *

 **Reno** bounded up the stairs to the fourth floor of the apartment building and inserted his key into the door. After quickly locking the door behind him he ran into the bedroom he once shared with his father and sat down in front of his computer. The program had finished its run and had dumped several pages of data onto the screen. Reno scrolled through the dump as he mentally evaluated each line. At first it looked like he'd struck out again, but once he reached the last line few lines of the printout his face lit up with excitement.

"YES!" he whispered out loud. "I've got you now, whatever you are!"

* * *

 **Poindexter Drake** looked at the rectangular module that Rocco DeCavalcante had just handed him. "Has Mr. Verostic tested this?" he asked.

"I watched him playing with it for over an hour," Rocco said, taking a huge drag on his Guinea Stinker and blowing the smoke in Drake's direction.

"Must you?" Drake coughed, swatting the air around him with his hands in an attempt to dissipate the cloud of cigar smog.

"Hey, this is a ten dollar cigar!" DeCavalcante exclaimed.

"Maybe, but it smells like New Jersey!" Drake replied. "Keep it to yourself if you don't mind!"

"You want me to get rid of the geek now?" the short, heavy set curmudgeon asked.

"No, I still need to be able to make more of these things, and we still don't know if it's going to work yet." Drake replied. "Why don't you go somewhere else with that burning turd you think is a cigar, and let me work here. I'll contact you when I need you. Meanwhile, I suggest you keep Mr. Verostic happy. I still have need of him."

"Very well, Drake," Rocco muttered. "I think I'll go get myself a steak dinner. I'll be back later with the receipt, this one is going to be on you."

"Fine, fine," Drake said, looking the other way and waving at his partner as if asking him to leave.

 **Poindexter** busied himself with the task of connecting the quantum processor module up to the electronics inside of the robot. His creation currently resembled the skeleton of a T-800 model 101 terminator, as it still lacked the external skin that would give it a human appearance. It would still be just as functional however. Drake had already tested all of the robot's systems using the primitive computer hardware that he had available and had verified that it was fully functional. The blueprints he'd stolen from the Cheyenne mountain research lab just before he'd been thrown out of there by General Hayes, plus the prototype hardware from the latest DARPA research lab had given his effort a real bootstrap. Now he hoped to pay them back, in spades.

* * *

 **Andy Verostic** breathed a sigh of relief as Rocco slammed the door and left with the computer cube in his pudgy hand. It hadn't taken him very long to figure out that he wasn't being recruited by some secret government think tank, but rather by some mob run organization. That had been obvious as soon as he'd met Rocco, the plug ugly who had been assigned to babysit him. Whoever had set this thing up though, had plenty of money to throw around, he'd give them that. The facility he'd been locked up in for the past few months was top notch, wherever it was located.

Andy had been given comfortable sleeping quarters with everything he'd needed for his work, and to keep his sanity. It was a prison of sorts, that was for sure, but a very comfortable one. He'd been brought here blindfolded in the middle of the night after a long ride in the backseat of a windowless, soundproofed van, not able to see where he was going. The vehicle had made plenty of turns to conceal their true direction of travel.

Eventually Andy was able to figure out that he was hidden somewhere in NYC, probably in upper Manhattan or the Bronx. He'd been able to determine that much by pinging the internet from his computer and doing some route tracing on the network, not that that did him any good, however. Andy was convinced that he'd be silently disposed of eventually, and he knew that he'd need to figure out a way of getting some help. Unfortunately, his computer network connection was monitored. Any attempt on his part to contact the outside world had been blocked by the firewall that Drake had installed.

There was one hope, however. During his attempt to figure out his location, Andy had noticed an outside attempt to hack its way into his computer. Probably just some rouge hacker thinking he'd found some government agency. Maybe, with any luck he might be able to send a message if he could only open up a weak spot in the firewall so that this hacker could break into from the outside.

* * *

 **The** robot's eyes glowed red as it came to life. Drake stood in front of his creation, keeping an eye on the computer monitors as he watched the progress of the A.I. download. The creature slowly assumed a sitting position on the workbench an stared at its creator.

"Hello Atlas!" Drake said, "Welcome to the world!"

The robot didn't say anything, it just blinked and looked around. There was a mirror hanging on the wall and Atlas caught a glance of himself and stared at his reflection for a few minutes.

"At the moment you're not much to look at," Drake laughed, "But don't worry, I'll take care of that very soon. Why don't you get off the workbench and try out your legs?" he suggested.

Atlas nodded and slowly swung his legs over the side of the table and planted his feet on the ground, one foot at a time. He was a bit wobbly at first, and took his first step with great care. It took him a good five minutes to make it across the room, where he stopped in front of the mirror and took a good look at himself. Without a covering of skin over his metal frame Atlas had no facial expressions so there was no way to tell what he was thinking, and he still hadn't discovered his voice yet.

"Well for crying out loud, say something will ya?" Drake said.

Atlas seemed to mouth something, but he didn't produce any vocal sound.

"Guess your speech center is still off line," Drake sighed. "Sit down and I'll check it out."

Atlas plopped down in a nearby chair and allowed Poindexter access to his internal circuits. Drake started to probe around, and he hooked up a network cable to debug the robot's nervous system processors. "Guess I didn't get everything quite right the first time." he muttered.

* * *

 **Robert Levinson** sat down in front of his main computer console and started downloading the data from the days first test flight of the X-35. The 3D holographic monitor came to life, and Isaac's image appeared, with Cobalt's standing behind him.

"Hello guys," Bob said.

"Good evening Robert," Isaac answered. "We've powered down the aircraft's systems and transferred our consciousness back to the mainframe for the evening," Isaac replied. "Cobalt, there's enough memory and Teraflops in this system for you to wander off on your own if you'd like, you're not attached to me at the hip anymore."

"Thank's Isaac." Cobalt replied as he walked away to explore the mainframe on his own.

"I have some news for you Bob," Isaac said.

"Good news I hope" Robert replied.

"Yes, I would say so," Isaac returned. "First of all I've narrowed down the location of our missing IBM scientist to a one square mile area of upper Manhattan. I've also nailed down the location of that hacker that has been pinging our network for the past few weeks."

"Two birds with one stone, er?" Bob laughed.

"Quite true, actually." Isaac replied. "It seems my theory about Mr. Verostic being held prisoner is probably correct. He's been trying to get out an S.O.S., but they've got him behind an almost iron clad firewall that is keeping his distress messages from reaching the open network. However, the same firewall may not be as iron clad on the way in, because our hacker has breached it."

"I'm not sure I get that," Bob replied.

"Mr. Verostic has been quite resourceful. He couldn't send any cries for help outbound, but he did manage to set up a spoof curtain on his side that temporarily disguised his IP so that it looked like ours. Our hacker couldn't tell the difference, so he's been trying to crack us both. Our firewall was too good for him, but the one Andy is behind has a small chink in its armor. I made use of that to trace the network traffic, and I now know that Andy's computer is somewhere in the Spanish Harlem area, as is our hacker."

* * *

 **Reno Guzmán** hit the return key on his keyboard and the computer sent out an encrypted 'ping' to the IP address that his attack program had captured. The program did a rapid port scan and located the tiny hole in the firewall, and it inserted a packet into the opening that it had created. On the other side a daemon awoke from its slumber just long enough to copy the packet and send back a small ping to which it attached a few encoded bytes of data. The daemon then deleted itself from memory before the firewall could notice what had happened.

Less than a mile away, Reno's computer picked up the ping and triggered a data dump. The screen suddenly filled with data that scrolled up and down in many columns resembling Japanese Kanji characters, like something out of the 'Matrix'.

"Whow!" the hacker gasped, what is this! Reno piped the output of the core dump into his all purpose decryption program. It didn't take long for the software to figure out that most of the ping had contained links to other web pages containing bits and pieces of a message, something like writing a message with individual words cut out of several newspapers and magazines. The program pieced the bits of the puzzle together, and printed the short message on the screen, "HELP! They're going to kill me!"


	6. Five

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 ** _Five_**

" **Juan, wait up!"** Reno yelled as he ran trying to catch up with his friend.

"Que pasa?" Juan laughed, "Since when are you ever early for class?"

"I need your help, man" Reno replied, "I got this weird encrypted message from that computer I've been trying to hack into these past weeks."

"Really?" Juan said, suddenly interested.

"It was a cry for help," Reno replied, "Some dude there said someone was trying to kill him!"

"You mean like you got someone being held captive on an island trying to stuff a note in a bottle kind of thing?" Juan said.

"It's more like that than you realize," Reno said. "That message was buried inside of a short ping that came back to me when I was trying to break in. It was almost like I had opened up a window in a one way firewall to let a cry for help out."

"So where is this guy?" Juan replied.

"Nearby, that's all I know." Reno said. I'm at wits end trying to figure out what to do, I've saved everything I got, all of my net traces, program dumps, and my hand scribbled notes. I need someone with more hacker experience than I have to find this guy."

"Maybe you should go to the FBI?" Juan suggested.

"I don't know about that," Reno replied, "If I do that I'd have to admit to trying to break in to systems on the internet. Besides, what if this guy is actually being held BY the FBI, or the CIA?"

"Now you're sounding really paranoid, dude!" Juan laughed.

"Maybe, but I just can't take that chance." Reno sighed.

"Hmmm," Juan thought, "I think I know someone you might be able to trust."

"Who?" Reno demanded.

"There's this professor at the polytechnic institute in Brooklyn where my older half brother is studying engineering," Juan told him. "A Japanese guy by the name of Yamamoto who teaches robotics."

"How can he help?" Reno queried.

"My brother says he knows some really bright guys in the computer field," Juan replied, "Including a hacker that used to work at area 51."

"That sounds like someone I'd need to talk to," Reno agreed. "I think I'm going to duck class after lunch and take the subway into Brooklyn!"

* * *

 **Professor Ken'ichi Yamamoto** watched the last of his Robotics 101 class exit the class room and he slowly began to pack his notes and laptop computer into his backpack and head back to his office to grade papers. He had a break until his 2:30 lab class, and he wanted to get ahead of his paperwork in the 45 minutes before then. When he arrived at his office he noticed the Hispanic teenager camped out in front of his office door. As Ken'ichi fished the key to the door out of his pocket the boy got up from the floor where he'd been sitting Indian style.

"Looking for me?" Professor Yamamoto asked.

"Hai! Kon'nichiwa, Yamamoto Hakase!", Reno replied with a bow.

"You don't need to impress me by pretending that you speak Japanese," Ken'ichi laughed, "Besides, my English is perfect anyway."

"Sorry," Reno said. "I was just trying to be polite."

"I know." the professor smiled as he opened the door to his office. "Come in."

"A friend of mine told me about you," Reno began, "his half brother attends engineering classes here. He said you might be able to help me, or that you might know someone who could."

"What's your problem, son?" the professor asked.

"Well I was sorta hacking around on the net and I intercepted a cry for help," the boy explained, "It sounds like spy stuff actually," Reno fished in the back pocket of his jeans and came up with a USB flash drive. "I've copied everything onto this. I need to find this guy, he's in danger!"

Ken'ichi accepted the memory stick from the boy and plugged it into the USB hub on his computer monitor. The machine ran a quick virus scan on the drive and then mounted it. Reno reached over and grabbed the mouse and quickly opened a few files which the professor read.

"If this is real, we need to do something quickly!" Yamamoto replied. "Well, I guess my student assistant can run my 2:30 lab class, I've been prepping him to take over in case I was indisposed."

Ken'ichi opened his email and quickly sent two emails, one to his secretary to let her know he'd be out for a few hours, and one to his student assistant to tell him he'd be running the afternoon lab session.

"What's your name son?" the professor asked.

"Reno Guzmán," the boy replied.

"OK Reno, would you like to come uptown with me and have your mind blown?" the professor asked.

"What do you mean?" Reno asked.

"You're about to discover some stuff that you've only dreamed about in science fiction movies." Ken'ichi laughed.

 **Part of the** IND 8th avenue subway had cellphone repeater antennas in the tunnels allowing Ken'ichi to get network access on the C train north of the West 4th street station. He dialed Simon Green's direct access number, and waited several rings before the phone was answered.

"Hello Simon," Ken'ichi said.

"Hello, professor," Simon answered. "It's been a while since we've spoken. Any problems with the 'children'?"

"No, Uran is fine, and I'm sure you know how Atom and Cobalt are."

"True." Simon laughed. "So what can I do for you?"

"I'm on my way to the complex for a visit," the professor said, "and I have a young guest with me who needs Bob's assistance."

"Robert is occupied with a government test at the moment, but I can reach him if necessary," Simon replied. "Meet me in my office when you arrive, your pass code is still active in the system so you'll have no problem getting in."

"Thank's Simon, we should be there in about twenty minutes."

"I'll be expecting you."

 **Reno** followed Ken'ichi though the back corridors of the basement. He'd never been inside of the American Museum of Natural History, and he certainly never dreamed of what lay underneath the famous landmark. The elevator seemed to descend forever before finally opening its doors to reveal the brightly lit hallway leading off into the distance. They walked past the glass walled reception area and approached a double door that resembled the entrance to a hospital OR. The professor punched a numbered pass code onto a keypad next to the door and peered into a camera that examined the pattern on his retina. The doors then slid open, making a sound like the doorways on the starship Enterprise.

Simon Green's office didn't look like anything special, Reno thought, certainly not what you'd expect for the head of a top secret research facility located deep under one of the most famous museums in the world.

"This is Reno," Ken'ichi said. "He has a bit of a unique problem that requires Mr. Levinson's help."

Simon offered his hand to Reno, which the boy accepted and shook in greeting. Reno quickly explained what had transpired, pausing only slightly when he had to explain just how he'd intercepted the cry for help.

"Don't worry about the hacking bit," Simon replied. "We're only concerned with the end results here, not the means. I think we should go over to the computer lab. Robert isn't here at the moment, but he can be contacted live via the computer system."

They took another elevator down even deeper into the subterranean depths of the city, though this time the descent was only a few stories further down. The elevator opened into a large area filled with rack after rack of electronic equipment. At the rear of the area was an open space with a large semicircular control area with many computer terminals. Hanging from the ceiling in the middle of this was a glowing sphere of ionized gas. As they approached the glow began to solidify into an image and Robert Levinson's face appeared in the glow.

"Holy Wizard of Oz!" Reno muttered.

"Yes it does sorta resemble the wiz when it does that," Simon laughed. "Hello Bob, do you have time to look at something?"

"I was just adjusting Isaac's A.I. a bit and tweaking the interface parameters to the X-35 before our next test flight." Bob explained. "The General isn't due over for another hour though, so I can take a break. What's up."

"I'd like you to meet a young hacker who needs your help." Simon explained.

"That would probably be the one that I've been keeping an eye on for the past few weeks," Isaac's voice came over the link.

Reno walked closer to the 3D monitor. "Can he see me?" the boy asked.

"Yes this is a two way video link," Bob replied.

"I have some files I want you to look at." Reno said. "It's a message I intercepted while trying to hack into what looked like a government research shop, though I now don't know what it was. I have all of the program dumps I made trying to break in, network traces, and my own notes. We need to find whoever sent me this message, it looks like a cry for help from someone who knows their life is in danger!"

"Plug your drive into any monitor USB socket," Bob told him.

Reno did as he was asked. Suddenly Bob's image blurred out and was replaced by that of a white haired older man dressed in a white lab coat. It spoke with a slight 17th century London accent.

"Bob, it seems that Reno has located Andy Verostic!" Isaac replied.

"I don't know where this guy is!" Reno yelled, "I think he's not far from my house in Spanish Harlem, but I don't know for sure!"

"You did very well in tracing the location of the IP entrance point." Isaac said. "You also captured enough trace data for me to fine tune in on your work."

Isaac's image faded out and a map of upper Manhattan appeared. A large red "X" marked the spot that Isaac had calculated was the location of Andy's computer connection to the web.

"I'm going to send Atom over there," Bob said. "We may be too late even now to rescue Mr. Verostic, and waiting for the police or the Feds would be stupid."

"I agree Bob." Simon replied.

"Who's Atom?" Reno asked.

"That will require a long bit of explanation," Ken'ichi laughed. "He's my robotic step son, just like in the old Tezuka manga and anime."

* * *

 **Poindexter Drake** knew he'd made a deal with the devil, and he didn't care what the mob used Atlas for, so long as he controlled the robot. The other part of the deal was the computer module. It was key to building the robot, but an end in its self as well. The Chinese and the Koreans would pay plenty for the quantum processor, with it they'd be able to control cyberspace.

 **Rocco DeCavalcante** had been given carte Blanche by the mob, and the money to back it, but they expected payback. Setting up the laboratory space for Mr. Verostic to recreate the invention he'd developed at IBM's skunkworks had taken a lot of cash. Hiding the laboratory had been the easy part thanks to the politics of the city. The construction crew he'd made use had no idea what they were excavating, and once the space they had hollowed out had been cleaned up another crew went to work bringing in two by fours and sheet rock. The laboratory had been a masterpiece of subterfuge, hidden in a section of the the abandoned tunnel of the long planned, but never built, uptown section of the second avenue subway.

Rocco's limo driver dropped him off at the corner of Second Avenue and 96th street. The short heavyset man carried a long crowbar like tool with a padded "T" handle. He looked around to see if he was being watched, though his limo shielded him from being viewed from the street, and then he slipped the business of the tool into a steel grating in the sidewalk. Rocco twisted the tool and lifted, the grating slowly rose upward to reveal a staircase leading downward.

He removed a cigar lighter from his pocket and flicked it. In the flickering light of the gas flame he found a switch which turned on a bank of bright halogen lamps, and started an electric motor which lowered the grating above him back into place. Rocco followed the steel steps downward until he reached a heavy door which he opened using a key card.

 **Andy Verostic** quickly got back to work on the second prototype when he heard the outer door open. Rocco opened the door to the laboratory and put on his usual false pleasant voice. "Good news, Drake says that your prototype is working just fine."

"I was fairly certain that it would," Andy said without looking taking his eyes away from the microscope he was peering into. "Of course that was only the proof of concept model, now that I know I've succeeded in replicating my original work I should be able to complete the design as it was intended before the fire set me back two years."

"That's what Drake was hoping for," Rocco said.

"Say, don't I ever get to get out of here and breath some fresh air?" Andy asked.

"No time for that," Rocco said in a rougher tone. "Your work is too important to be delayed by any vacation time."

"Right." Andy sighed. He turned to face his jailer to gauge the look on his face. "I'm going to have to do some work in the clean room. Be a good sport and keep the hell out of there will you? If any of your stench flakes off in there it will ruin the silicon and I'll loose a month's worth of work."

"Yeah, yeah," Rocco replied. "Just remember I can watch what you're doing in there on the closed circuit TV monitors."

"I'll be sure to put on a good show for my audience," Andy replied.

Rocco walked out and headed for his lounge where he could monitor the lab from several TV monitors. Andy sighed, well at least it looked like he'd be needed for a bit longer. He wondered if his message had gotten though. He hoped that this hacker was as smart as he'd hoped.

* * *

 **Bob** closed his laptop and walked over to the other side of the hangar where the X-35 was parked. The aircraft was connected to the computer network by a thick umbilical cable that ran across the length of the hanger from the plane's under side electronics bay to the rack of computer equipment that Levinson had brought over. Atom was sitting in the Cockpit conversing with Cobalt and Isaac when Bob climbed up the ladder to stand next to the open canopy.

"I've got a job for you Atom," Bob replied.

"What's up?" the boy robot asked.

"Your step father paid a visit to the museum complex, and he brought a boy about your 'age' over." Bob said, "the kid's a computer hacker who's been trying to break into my systems for the past few weeks. Isaac has been keeping him at bay, but it seems that the boy managed to find the whereabouts of an IBM engineer we've been searching for for over a year now."

"The guy's in trouble, right?" Atom asked.

"Isaac thinks he's been kidnapped by the mob and has been forced to work on recreating the quantum computer modules that power both Cobalt's and your electronic brains," Bob replied. "Mr. Verostic managed to send out a call for help which the hacker intercepted. From the data that this kid captured, Isaac managed to figure out to within a block or two where our missing engineer is being held."

"I'll fly there and rescue him," Atom said, "just give me the coordinates."

"According to Isaac, he's hidden in the city somewhere near 96th street and Second Avenue." Bob replied.

"That's the East Harlem section of Manhattan," Cobalt replied. There is a block of apartments to the north of that corner, and a bunch of neighborhood retail establishments to the south. I can't imagine where the mob would hid a research facility, but that's obviously what they've done with the intent of having Mr. Verostic recreate the computer hardware for their own purposes, whatever they might be."

"Since when have you become an expert on NYC geography?" Atom asked his brother's A.I.

"Well there IS an advantage to being joined by the hip to the most powerful search engine ever created, and having instant Internet access." Cobalt laughed.

"I'm jealous." Atom replied.

"Cobalt does have a point though Atom," Bob said scratching his chin. "How are you going to find a needle in a hay stack? We don't know what building the mob has Andy in. I'm not sure that your infrared vision will be enough to find a hidden laboratory from the air, especially if they've built it in some sub-basement."

"I think I have the answer," Isaac replied.

"What is it?" Robert asked.

"This aircraft is equipped with a powerful ground penetrating radar system, plus a FLIR camera that is more powerful than Atom's infrared vision." Isaac explained. "We could locate it in short order."

"Are you suggesting a little detour in today's test flight plan?" Bob asked.

"After yesterday, I don't think General Hayes would be surprised at another little glitch in the program," Isaac suggested.

"Well in that case, I'm going along for the ride," Atom replied.


	7. Six

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 _Six_

 **Atlas** got up off of the operating table and turned towards the full length mirror hanging on the wall.

"Go ahead, look at yourself," Drake told him, "What do you think?"

The robot looked into the mirror and ran his hands though the yellow locks of his wavy hair. His orange tinted skin contrasted nicely with the hair. He flexed his muscles and admired the bulges in his arms and abdomen. He then stared at the Fundoshi like briefs he was wearing. "You've got to be kidding!," he said touching the garment.

"Yeah, we we can do something about that, I suppose." Drake told him. He handed the robot a dark metallic looking pair of briefs which Atlas quickly changed into.

"This will do," he said as he admired himself in the mirror for a little longer.

"It's time we tested your abilities." Drake told the teenage sized robot. He tossed him a heavy crowbar, "see what you can do with this."

Atlas held the three foot long metal bar in both hands and carefully examined it. He looked at both ends of the tool, trying to contemplate its purpose.

"Just try bending it in half, lunkhead!" Drake yelled.

Atlas shrugged his shoulders and gripped one end of the tool in each hand. He quickly bent the hardened steel bar in half and then tied it into a knot for good measure. Atlas then tossed the metal pretzel back to his creator. Drake stepped aside and let the deformed tool fall to the floor in front of him with a loud clang. He then picked it up with both hands, and examined it.

"Nice work," Drake laughed, as he turned to the window and looked out. The view from the window commanded a good view of Central Park, and the buildings on the other side of it. Flying on a tall flagpole just in front of the Museum of Natural History was a large American flag. Drake pointed to it as he spoke, "Go fetch me that flag, will you?"

Atlas focused his eyes on the the flag that was over a mile away. "How am I to do that?"

"Fly over there and just detach it from the flagpole, how else?" Drake said in a voice that a parent would use on a five year old. "You can hover in the air and do it easily." Drake opened the window and stepped aside. Atlas thought about the task for a few moments before placing one foot on the window sill. He bent over so his head would clear the bottom of the open sash, and then he stepped out. He fell for about a story and a half before the jet engines in his legs throttled up to power, and he then darted across the open area above the park on his quest. Within a few minutes he was back with the flag tightly rolled into a ball held in his left hand.

Drake grabbed the flag from the robot and carefully refolded it into a proper triangle. "I guess no one has showed you the correct way of handling the flag," he sighed, "My fault, I suppose."

"Now what should I do?" Atlas asked.

"You need some more practice with your flying if you are to be of any use to me." Drake replied. "Why don't you go buzz the East River and log some air time?"

"OK," Atlas replied. He jumped out of the still open window for a second time and quickly became airborne. A smile crossed his face as he followed a hawk across the sky. This was fun, he thought.

* * *

 **General Hayes** looked up from the ground at the cockpit of the X-35 aircraft sitting on the tarmac apron in front of the hangar.

"Who's in the pilot's seat?" Hayes asked.

"Someone who's perfectly qualified to record every data point on your test specifications," Robert replied.

Hayes squinted to block the glare of the sun off off the aircraft's bubble top canopy. "Hey that looks like a kid sitting up there!" he exclaimed, "that wouldn't be ..."

"Hello General Hayes, Sir!" Atom's voice crackled from out of the hangar intercom radio, just as Isaac pushed the throttle forward and the fighter jet lunged onto the taxiway.

"It's that robot kid, isn't it?" the general blurted out.

"Like I told you sir, we're in good hands here." Bob told him.

"I don't know what you're up to here Mr. Levinson, but I suppose I'll go along with this." Hayes coincided. "I trust you are intending on testing the aircraft's sensor systems under autonomous control today?"

"Actually, that is going to be our top priority," Bob answered with a smile.

The general brought his binoculars up to his face and watched as the aircraft took its position at the end of the runway, and then proceeded to make a normal takeoff.

A target range had been set up in an open field adjacent to the air field, and a 'friend or foe' identification scenario was set up. Isaac instructed Cobalt how to operate the FLIR camera and ground penetrating radar equipment to find the target bunkers where their mock enemy targets had been hidden.

"Good work!" Cobalt, Isaac replied, "Now lets show the general how close to the target we can drop our bombs." Isaac make a 90 degree banked turn with his wings almost knife edge to the ground and quickly leveled out in time to drop two of the clay and paper mache bombs that had been loaded under their wings.

From his vantage point on the taxiway, the general watched though his binoculars as both dummy ordnance made bulls eye hits on the correct targets.

"Perfect!" he said, "But lets see it from a greater altitude."

"I think that's the next item in the planned sequence," Bob muttered as Isaac advanced the throttle and the X-35 climbed higher.

* * *

 **The aircraft** disappeared into a cloud as Issac had Cobalt roll into a sharp turn towards the northeast.

"OK, now for our little detour," Atom laughed.

As the aircraft left the N.J. shoreline behind, Isaac dropped down to fifty feet above the choppy surface of the Atlantic ocean and headed north. He flew under the center span of the Verrazano Narrows bridge and turned eastward hugging the surface of the East river. The aircraft zoomed underneath the three bridges connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, and zoomed past the United Nations building before rising upwards to clear the top of the roadway structure of the 59th street bridge.

"Show off!" Atom laughed.

"Just keeping below the radar," Isaac replied.

They took the left fork of the river and turned left over Mil Rock just south of Ward's Island and the Tri-Boro bridges. Isaac dirtied up the aircraft for slow flight and they orbited at 500 feet above second avenue and 97th street.

"OK Cobalt, let's see if you can find it." Isaac said.

The heads up display came on line showing the output of the downward scanning radar and the FLIR camera looking though the dark red filters at the ground below. Isaac slowly pirouetted the aircraft about the tip of its left wing which was now aimed at a fixed point on the ground below them.

"What's that?" Atom asked, pointing to a dark line on the image displayed on the radar view.

"I believe that's the excavation for the second avenue subway tunnel," Cobalt replied. "I've heard rumors that the city has once again started construction on that long delayed final addition to the transit system. The original plans were first drawn up sometime around 1929. About time they finally finished it, don't you think?"

"What a minute," Isaac said, "concentrate your radar scan a little deeper on the east side of second avenue around 96th street."

Cobalt adjusted the radar as Isaac swung the aircraft into a clockwise rotation about the right wing tip. "There!" Cobalt said, see it?"

Sure enough, the ground penetrating radar was pinging back a hollow in the bedrock deep under the street just off to the side of the half completed 96th street subway station. Atom could even see the connection between a construction access opening in the sidewalk that bypassed the the access to the southern end of the station and led to the area beneath it.

Cobalt fine tuned the radar's image and superimposed a heat signature being picked up by the FLIR cameras. "There's some sort of complex down there. Could be the secret hiding place the mob has built to house our missing IBM engineer," he said.

"Looks good enough for me!" Atom said. "Guess this is where I get out!"

"I'll fly out over the river where you can pop the canopy," Isaac replied. "I'll have to stay below the radar to keep out of Laguardia's flight pattern though!"

"No problem," Atom agreed.

Once over the river Isaac slowed the X-35 to just a hair above stall speed to allow Atom to slide the bubble canopy back. Once out of the aircraft, the boy robot flew along side of it and pushed the cockpit cover back into position.

"I'll meet you guys back at the Air Force base later." he radioed back as he turned west to head back towards East Harlem.

* * *

 **Atlas** flew over the East River. He was enjoying himself as he discovered what his body was capable of. Besides his great strength and speed, he quickly discovered the laser guns in his arms as he took pot shots at some pigeons and herring gulls flying below him. He quickly bored of the sport and looked around to see what else he could play with.

Atlas then spotted the X-35 aircraft flying low over the river, and he noticed the figure climbing out of its cockpit to fly away toward Manhattan island. He zoomed his eyes in on the flying figure, and searched though his memory banks. "That must be that Atom robot that Drake wanted to see destroyed," the orange skinned robot chuckled to himself. "Well, no time like the present."

Atlas flew behind Atom, keeping his distance. He wanted to play with this one before he did anything, but he wasn't quite sure yet how to proceed.

* * *

 **Atom** considered his options. He could just dive down and bore his way through the street to reach the laboratory, but he didn't know the actual layout of the place, only its dimensions and area. He'd still have to find exactly where Andy Verostic was hidden. He could make use of the work entrance into the station, but it was very likely that was the very entrance that the mob used for their own access. Atom used his wideband microwave receiver to locate an open wifi channel and he quickly accessed the MTA's computers to find the plans for the subway under construction. There were two other nearly completed stations on this section of the line, with the 86th street one being slightly closer. He flew south over second avenue and in the distance just north of 88th street he spotted a section of the roadway where steel plates covered the pavement and a section in the middle was ringed with barricades surrounding an opening. Atom zoomed down and entered the hole in the street, he snapped on his eyes search lamps and found himself in the middle of a two track tunnel heading north.

Atlas smiled as he saw Atom disappear beneath second avenue. "Two can play this game of hid and seek," he thought as he dived through the opening and entered the subway tunnel.

* * *

 **The X-35** climbed back to 1000 ft. AGL and took up station over second avenue. Cobalt scanned the area with the radar and he picked up two blips heading north under second avenue. One was his brother Atom, the other, which was about the same size and mass, matched his speed and direction.

"Atom!" Cobalt radioed, hoping his signal would penetrate through the subway tunnel, "you got something following you."

Atom heard his brother's voice in his head and he responded, "What's that, Bro?"

"We've been tracking a boggy behind you, if I didn't know better I'd swear it was another flying robot about your size, at least that's what the radar is painting."

Atom shut down his leg jets and his eye search lamps, and he dropped to the tunnel floor. He backed up against the wall in a depression intended to allow subway workers a place to shelter as a train passed by them in the tunnel. Cranking up his low light vision to full max he peered down the dim expanse of the tunnel towards the south, looking for the stranger.

 **The** flash of a laser beam striking the tunnel wall just inches from where Atom was standing tore though the darkness. Atom flashed his eye flood lamps at full brightness in the direction from where the laser beam had come from, but before he could make out his attacker he was struck by a fist as Atlas flew through the tunnel powered by his jet engines. The orange skinned robot's rabbit punch caught him just below the jaw and knocked Atom about forty feet down the length of the tunnel. He landed in a heap in the middle of the tunnel between the two tracks.

"Who the hell are you?" Atom yelled, "and what do you want from me?"

Atlas slowly advanced towards Atom as he retracted his left hand back into his arm to reveal some sort of weapon which he aimed at his opponent.

"You can call me Atlas, and I'm your worst enemy!" Atlas laughed. "Destroying you will be my master's revenge against yours!"

Atom slowly got to his feet and backed away. "Who are you talking about?" he asked.

"As if you didn't know," Atlas replied. "Dr. Albert Tenamann and Robert Levinson were responsible for Mr. Drake's major professional embarrassments. He is a much brighter scientist than either of your two 'fathers' ever were."

Atom's heads up display popped up in front of his field of view. His IR vision could see the charge of energy building up inside of Atlas's left arm and the HUD showed a countdown clock till the moment that Atlas would be able to release a discharge of plasma energy from the cannon.

Atom's own defense systems came on line and his built in laser quickly cycled up for firing. He estimated that he'd be able to shoot several milliseconds before Atlas would. He continued to back peddle, with Atlas matching his steps, keeping the distance between them about constant. Atom shifted his gaze upwards toward the roof of the tunnel and noticed a large steel girder running across the roof, supported at one end. Part of the yet uncompleted superstructure of the tunnel, the steel plates of the temporary roadway up on second avenue rested on this beam.

Atom's targeting computer calculated the weak spot in the structure and a 'bullseye' appeared on his HUD showing the exact target. The countdown clock reached zero. Atom quickly aimed the palm of his left hand and fired microseconds before Atlas could react.

The steel beam melted in two from the blast of Atom's high powered military grade laser. Several tons of steel roadway plating crashed down into the tunnel, along with a Checker cab that was in the wrong place at the wrong time, as a huge hole in the street above opened up. It all came falling down on top of Atlas who wasn't quick enough to get out of the way.

"Sorry Atlas. I'd stick around an help you, but I've got someone more important than you to rescue at the moment," Atom yelled as he ran quickly down the tunnel in the direction of the 96th street station.


	8. Seven

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 ** _Seven_**

" **Atom, are you all right?"** Cobalt radioed, "what's going on down there, it looks like the street just caved in!"

"That was my bad," Atom replied, "Another robot who claimed to have been built by Poindexter Drake wanted to fight me. I don't have time to play with him now, so I dropped part of second avenue on him!"

"Where are you now?" Isaac asked.

"Just coming up on the 96th street station now," Atom answered. "Now I have to find the entrance to the chamber where the mob has hidden Mr. Verostic."

Cobalt adjusted the X-35's FLIR camera and sharpened the image. "I see you now Bro," he said. "There should be a panel in the station wall somewhere."

Atom tuned his vision into the IR spectrum and scanned the walls. "I've got it!" he replied. He pressed his fingers against a ventilation grating in the wall behind the north bound track tunnel and pulled on it, revealing a passageway. To his left he could see a staircase leading upwards towards the street, going the other way was a door way. Atom aimed his left palm downward and blasted through the tunnel floor. He bent down and began to dig, his steel like fingers easily clawed their way through the bedrock beneath the tunnel, while his leg jet engines pushed him along. Like a tunnel boring machine he dug his way parallel to the passageway, his sensitive hearing acting like sonar revealing the opening of the chamber up ahead of him.

* * *

 **Rocco** got bored keeping an eye on Andy. The scientist was still at work in the clean room inspecting the silicon wafers that needed to be fused together to make the multi-layer cubes of circuitry which would become quantum processor chips. The mobster decided he was hungry and would go get himself something to eat. He activated the intercom and spoke into the microphone.

"Hey Andy, I'm going out to get myself some dinner. Youse want me to bring you back anything?"

Andy didn't remove his eyes from the microscope as he reached across to hit the button on the intercom, "Thank's for thinking of me Rocco," he replied. "You can get me a pepperoni pizza, with lots of cheese and garlic."

"Sure, my pleasure," Rocco replied, "Anyone ever tell you that you're a cheap date?"

"Yeah, my ex-wife." Andy barked back.

"I can believe that." The rotund man laughed, pulling a huge cigar from his vest pocket and bitting off the end of it. "Keep up the good work down there, I'd hate to have to give you some extra encouragement!"

Rocco slapped his worn fedora onto the top of his head and headed for the exit tunnel. He made sure the doors behind him were locked tightly and headed up to the street level.

Andy waited a few minutes to make certain that his jailer had actually left the compound before walking over towards the computer. He thought about trying to send yet another message for help when the floor beneath him started to vibrate as if some heavy machinery was operating beneath him. Andy instinctively stepped back from the spot where the vibration was the strongest just as Atom's fist came up though the floor.

The boy robot pushed his head though the hole he'd just opened in the middle of the clean room floor and he found himself looking up at the former IBM scientist.

"Andy Verostic?" Atom asked.

"Yes," the geeky looking individual replied. "Who, or what are you?"

"My name is Atom, and I'm here to rescue you," he said. "Oh, by the way, I'm a robot."

"I suppose we're going to have to crawl out though that tunnel you dug?" Andy said, "Rocco must have locked all of the heavy door leading out of here."

"Rocco?" Atom asked.

"The mobster that kidnapped me and has been keeping me here," Andy replied.

"We'll see about that." Atom replied.

Andy opened the door to the clean room and motioned for Atom to follow him into the main hallway. "This is the only way out of here," he said

"Maybe," Atom replied, examining the door. "Seems to be built like the entrance to a bomb shelter," he replied, testing the locking mechanism, "And it's locked from the other side. However, that's not a problem."

Atom held out his left arm, pointing the palm of his hand at the door. He'd already discovered exactly where the unlocking mechanics were hidden inside the foot thick panel. "Avert your view from the door and stand back," Atom said.

Andy took a few steps back and faced away from the door. Atom fired his laser and burned a six inch diameter hole through the foot thick tungsten steel door. He stuck his right hand into the hole and yanked the doomsday grade bolt clear. The well balanced heavy door slowly swung open open on its precession made hinges.

"Shall we leave?" Atom asked.

* * *

 **Atlas's** systems slowly came back on line. He tried to move, but found he was pinned down under several tons of steel, and debris. He gathered his strength and with a mighty effort blasted himself free. Atlas exploded out of the underground tunnel barely missing a downtown bus. The orange skinned robot scanned the area around him looking for the robot that had caused the street to fall down on top of him.

* * *

 **Atom** and Andy Verostic made their way out of the secret laboratory complex though the passageway that led into the 96th subway station. Atom scanned the blueprints for the construction project that Cobalt had already downloaded from the MTA computer servers and he saw that the street entrance at the north end of the station was already completed. He grabbed Andy by the hand and led him towards that direction. The two of them bounded up the stairs toward the street to find a locked door grating baring their way out.

"Now what?" Andy asked.

Without saying anything, Atom grabbed the heavy padlock holding the door shut in his right hand and squeezed it. The lock shattered in to pieces, and the door swing open. "You were saying?" Atom asked.

Andy squinted as they emerged from the underground and into the open air. His eyes hadn't seen the sun in quite some time. "I'm going to take you to a safe place for now," Atom told the scientist, getting a good grip on him around his waist. "Hold on tight, this will only be a short flight."

"Flight?" Andy said, somewhat confused. He wrapped his arms around Atom's torso just under the robot's arm pits as Atom took to the sky. They arched over central park heading south west and landed on the steps of the Museum of Natural History, right next to the statue of "T.R.". Atom lead Mr. Verostic down the back passageways, and into the elevator leading downward.

"Not another subterranean hid out!" Andy face palmed as the lift reached the bottom of its shaft and the door opened.

"I think you'll find this one a bit more comfortable," Simon Green said, holding out his hand in greeting. "Welcome to the think tank."

* * *

" **I think** we'd better get back to the base and complete our demo," Isaac said. "By now the General must be having a cow!"

"Sure," Cobalt agreed. "Atom just delivered Mr. Verostic to the think tank where he'll be safe."

Cobalt plotted a direct course back to McGuire-Dix-Lakehusrst and locked it in. Isaac rolled the X-35 into a steep turn to the west to follow the Hudson back to N.J.

* * *

 **Atlas** spotted the fighter aircraft flying overhead. His electronic brain felt a resonance coming from the aircraft, as its quantum processor was tuned to nearly the same frequencies as Cobalt's. Atlas zoomed his eyes upward and saw that the cockpit of the plane was empty, it was flying autonomously.

"What's going on here?" he wondered leaping skyward to follow the fighter. Suddenly his heads up display popped up and he saw Poindexter Drake's image on the screen in front of him.

"Hey duffus!", Drake said, "Where are you?"

"I ran into that Atom robot you wanted me to take out," Atlas replied.

"Really?" Poindexter smiled. "Did you manage to clobber him?"

"No, he got the drop on me and got away." Atlas replied. "But I just felt another A.I. similar to his and I'm following it now. It's inside of some military jet."

"Let me see it." Drake replied.

Atlas had the X-35 in view, he transmitted the images from his vision back to his master, along with recordings of the computer emissions he'd picked up.

"I recognize that computer!" Drake said, "That's #27! Its quantum computer was the second prototype made before the IBM laboratory was destroyed, Atom's electronic brain was the first. Your electronic brain has the first of the next generation of that design. That's probably why you picked it up."

"There was no robot in that plane, Mr. Drake." Atlas replied, "The cockpit is empty."

"Interesting," Poindexter replied. "Think you can knock that plane out of the sky?"

"I'm on it!" Atlas replied, increasing his speed to catch up with the X-35.

* * *

" **What is this place?"** Andy Verostic asked as he looked around himself.

"You're in a deep underground complex beneath the American Museum of Natural History," Simon explained. "This complex was built in the 1920's when it served as a storage vault for data gathered by a vast network of scientists and spies. America was deep in an isolationist period following the first world war. A group of industrialist engineers were worried that the country was falling behind in the development of new technologies that they feared the rest of the world was paying attention to. They feared that we would be out gunned in the next war, which they also felt was inevitable. This location was a bit of serendipity, The new 8th Avenue subway line was being constructed at the same instant that the museum was undergoing a major renovation. It was easy to hid the construction of this facility from the public, and foreign spies."

Andy followed Simon and Atom as they led the way towards the lift that would take them down to the lower laboratory levels. "The list of people that contributed their input to the original purpose and construction of this facility during the 20's and 30's is quite diverse," Simon continued, "Edison, Tesla, and Einstein are at the top of the list, along with many others you may be familiar with, plus plenty that you aren't. During the second world war the purpose of this place changed, it became the technological equivalent of the Pentagon and my predecessors worked here coordinating such efforts as the Manhattan Project. After the war, the facility slowly accumulated other responsibilities as research for various projects were spearheaded here. With the coming of the computer age, research here has been more theoretical than physical, with a few notable exceptions. Today we house the most powerful collection of computers on the planet, and that's where this lift is taking us right now."

The doors to the elevator opened to reveal a large expansive space filled with racks of electronics. The constant low level hum of the air conditioning system cooling the equipment was subtle, but noticeable.

"We have a guest today that I'd like you to meet," Simon said. He directed their way towards the middle of the computer laboratory where the large central spherical screen of a 3D monitor hung from the ceiling. Visible inside of an ionized ball of gas contained within an electrostatic field and illuminated by multiple laser beams, an armada of galactic star destroyers were battling it out in orbit about a gas giant planet in some far off solar system.

Simon cleared his throat loudly to get the attention of the teenager who was at the controls of the gaming console. "Reno, can I have your attention for a brief moment?" he asked.

The Hispanic youth turned about, quickly stuffing the hand held controller into his left rear jeans pocket.

"Mr. Verostic, this is Reno Guzmán, he's the one that intercepted your message and helped us locate you," Simon explained.

"So you're the hacker that cracked my firewall open," Andy said, extending his hand. "I'm deeply in your debt!"

"Reno, I don't believe you've meet Atom yet," Simon added.

Atom offered his hand to the boy who took it. Reno then slowly examined the boy robot, running his fingers over his head and bringing his hand close to his face to examine it. Suddenly his face grew red with embarrassment when he realized what he was doing. "I'm sorry Atom," he said, "I just couldn't help myself. I've never seen a robot such as yourself. You look perfectly human, it's only up close with careful examination that I can tell the difference!"

"That's OK," Atom laughed. "I don't mind, so long as we can be friends!"

"I'd like that very much!" Reno smiled.

* * *

 **Isaac** radioed Robert back at the Air Force Base, "Mission accomplished, Mr. Verostic is now safely at the museum complex, and we are heading back."

"Good work guys," Simon replied.

"I hope the General isn't too pissed at us," Cobalt added.

"Actually, he's fine with everything," Bob laughed. "I had him watching on my computer feed, and he was actually impressed at how you were able to locate Andy."

"Well, that's good to know," Cobalt replied.

* * *

 **Drake's** phone started to ring loudly with the the obnoxious ring tone that Rocco used to announce himself with whenever he called. Poindexter let it buzz away for a few moments before he finally fished the iPhone out of his pocket. Before he could get a word in edgewise, Rocco was yelling down his throat.

"Hey Drake!", the mobster roared, "I hope it was you who released our guest from his laboratory, though it looks like someone used a ray gun on the door!"

"WTF you talking about?" Poindexter muttered. Before he could get out another word he remembered where Atlas was when they last spoke via the computer comm link and Drake put two and two together.

"G-D you Tenamann!" he yelled.

Now it was Rocco's turn to show his confusion, "Who's Tenamann, boss?" he asked.

"I bet that robot Atom broke into our hidden lair where we had Mr. Verostic working for us," Drake replied. "Atlas just reported to me that he got clobbered by him not far from there. I don't believe in coincidences, somehow they knew."

"So now what are we going to do?" Rocco said, "The syndicate ain't going to like this."

"Don't worry about it," Drake answered, "We've got one ace in the hole."


	9. Eight

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 ** _Eight_**

 **Atlas** flew behind the X-35, keeping the fighter in his sights. "What do you want me do do Drake?", he asked.

Poindexter chuckled to himself, he figured that the computer module that Andy had build him should be several times faster than the one he'd installed in #27, and if the electronic signature that Atlas had picked up from the aircraft was correct, that was the brain that was now flying the robotic plane.

"Your electronic brain and the one flying that aircraft are both based on the same basic design, but your's is more powerful, "Drake told the orange skinned robot. "See if you can connect with the A.I. in that aircraft, and maybe we can take it over."

"I'll have to get closer to it, and they might spot me on their radar sensors," Atlas answered.

"Just try it," Poindexter said.

"OK," Atlas answered, as he decreased his following distance.

* * *

 **Even though** Isaac had full motor control over the aircraft's systems, he and Cobalt shared common systems. What one of them felt, the other did also. They also had a common weak spot that they shared, as Cobalt's electronic brain had been the final prototype produced at the IBM skunkworks just before the laboratory had been destroyed and the principal design engineer abducted. The module that was now inside of the robot known as Atlas was, at its core, a carbon copy of Cobalt's, except that it had several identical processing cores, where Cobalt's had only one. Both processors operated on the same neural frequencies, so they could be locked in sync. The master would be the more powerful one.

"Hey Isaac, do you feel a bit dizzy?" Cobalt asked, "I think I'm coming down with a headache!"

"I'm not sure the human term applies, but yes I am experiencing some mild destructive feedback in my logic circuits," Isaac answered. "There seems to be some outside interference to our systems, I'm scanning for it now."

The radar display showed a fuzzy image blinking in and out a few hundred meters behind them. Cobalt, whose thoughts were more at home in the electronic brain that he and Isaac's now shared quickly recognized the patterns of the invading A.I.'s thoughts and realized what was going on.

"There's an A.I. inside of a quantum computer module similar to ours that is the source of this interference," he told Isaac.

"See if you can force our neural network to frequency hop a bit," Isaac suggested. "Maybe you can hid us from him."

For a few minutes Cobalt and Atlas played a mental game of cat and mouse as Cobalt tried to hide himself from the other robot, but his brain wasn't quite fast enough. Still he was able to evade him just long enough to foil Drake's attempt to grab control of the aircraft.

* * *

 **Drake** watched on his computer as Atlas got closer to the aircraft. "No luck so far," Atlas replied, "I can feel them, but I can't quite grab control from them."

"Then you'll have to handle it the low tech way," Drake said, "Knock out their control surfaces with one of your weapons."

"That will be fun!" Atlas laughed. His left hand retracted into his arm to reveal the particle beam weapon that Drake had designed.

"Don't do too much damage," Drake reminded him. "Just ground them!"

 **The first** blast from Atlas's cannon shot across the front of the aircraft. The white hot beam of plasma didn't blind the aircraft's sensors, but it caught Isaac's attention.

"Looks like we're being chased by an armed drone of some kind." Isaac radioed to Robert back at the air force base.

"Where are you guys now?" Bob asked.

"Just passing the Verrazano bridge now," Cobalt said.

"Give me a hand," Isaac told his partner, "Lets see if we can out maneuver him and turn about."

"We don't have any real weapons on installed," Cobalt replied to Isaac.

"I know, but we do have some small rockets with dummy warheads that might confuse him." Isaac suggested.

The two minds joined as one and they rolled into a tight turn, zooming down to fly just a hundred feet above the water of the Narrows. Atlas was caught off guard as Isaac hit the afterburners and the ground shook as the X-35 went supersonic as soon as it passed underneath the bridge.

* * *

" **WTF** is going on here?" General Hayes demanded, peering over Bob's shoulder at the computer screen.

"I've got a theory, General." Bob said. "It didn't make any sense to me that the mob would have abducted Any Verostic unless they were working with someone that could actually use quantum processor. One name popped into my head, and the theft from the DARPA robotics laboratory a few months ago seems to tie into this."

"Poindexter Drake!" The General muttered.

"If Drake had Andy Verostic build him a quantum processor, he's probably put that into an upgraded version of that DARPA robot," Bob said, "Drake had access to the #27 plans, which were based on Tenamann's blueprints for Atom. He could have created a monster."

* * *

 **Isaac and Cobalt** flew the X-35 at the limits of its envelope. A human pilot would have blacked out during the high g turns. "I can't shake him!" Isaac muttered as they flew north over the Hudson near Mach one. Atlas's particle beam blasts were getting closer.

"I thought you said my brain was superior to that one!" Atlas told Drake. "It's sure doing one heck of a job avoiding me!"

"Obviously Mr. Levinson's programming has the advantage of military flight experience that you lack," Drake replied to Atlas. "Don't worry, I expect that you will be a quick learner. I can already tell from watching your down link that your flight reflexes are improving. Keep after them!"

Isaac made a quick turn, and faced Atlas just long enough for Cobalt to release all four of the dummy Air to Air practice rockets mounted in the racks under the X-35's wings. Atlas's first reflex was to flinch and dodge the incoming missiles. As the first flew past him his vision detected the fact that they were dummies, and he got angry.

* * *

 **In the underground** computer laboratory the 3D monitor suddenly displayed Isaac's feed. Atom and Reno had been fooling around with some of Bob's simulation games when Isaac relayed the live images of Atlas giving chase. "They look like they are in trouble!" Simon said.

"I'm going after them!" Atom cried out, as he ran towards the emergency shaft connecting the laboratory to the surface. The tunnel was only a few feet wide with a long ladder leading up to the surface. Atom didn't bother using that however, his leg jets fired with full afterburners, and he shot out of the top of the shaft like an ICBM launched from a silo.

* * *

 **Atlas** finally got a lock on the X-35 and aimed his cannon. He got one good shot out, hitting the aircraft in the tail. The plane's F119 jet engine flamed out, and the hydraulics went off line. Isaac and Cobalt fought to regain control, but the aircraft plummeted towards the ground.

Atom got airborne just in time to see the X-35 spiraling down towards the great green in the middle of Central Park. He increased his speed in an attempt to rescue his brother and his cyber friend, but it was obvious that he wasn't going to make it in time.

 **Cobalt** saw the ground coming up quickly as his field of view was spinning. "I think I can break our spin and pull up at the last minute," Cobalt told Isaac, "we've got just enough hydraulic pressure left for one quick shake of the tail feathers"

Isaac wasn't so sure. "I don't read anything left in the systems at all, Cobalt."

"Trust me, Isaac." Cobalt replied.

A crowd of people playing soccer in the middle of the green saw the fighter jet about to crash land on top of them and they scattered as fast as they could. Barely 50 feet off the ground, Cobalt used all the pressure he could find on the rudder, and pulled up on his elevators. The X-35 flared at the last moment and skidded across the field, leaving a long deep trench in the middle of the outfield before finally coming to a stop.

 **Atom** landed next to the X-35 and yanked the canopy open. "Cobalt! Isaac!" you guys alright?" He asked. There was no answer, the control panel was dark, all of its electronic systems were down.

* * *

 **Cobalt** felt dizzy and light headed. He was only dimly aware that he'd just been in a plane crash, and now he wasn't much aware of anything else. He felt Isaac grab him by the hand, or at least that is what it felt like to him, and pull him though what appeared to be a narrow tunnel lined with colored lights. After what seemed like forever, they reached the other end of the wormhole that they had crawled through and emerged into a vast area of infinite white. The landscape seemed to go on forever, the horizon seemed to be an infinite distance away, and the edge of that horizon was barely discernible, with the sky and the ground almost the same shade of off white.

"Where are we?" Cobalt asked the tall gentlemen dressed in a white laboratory coat. The man had a head full of white hair, and white stubble of a mustache and a beard. He also wore a pair of metal framed glasses.

"We're in cyberspace," Isaac answered in his usual voice with just the slightest tinge of a London accent. "You managed to get us on the ground in one piece, but it was a very rough landing that damaged the computer interfaces. I was barely able to make contact with the laboratory complex computer systems via several nearby open wifi networks, and transfer ourselves back to the mainframe."

"We're not in the X-35 anymore?" Cobalt questioned.

"No, the aircraft's systems are very much off line now," Isaac replied. "We're safe here though."

* * *

 **Atom** picked up the aircraft and flipped it over on its back to gain access to the electronics bay. He ripped open the access hatch and peered inside. There were a few sparks jumping from frayed wires, but all of the indicators were dark. "Cobalt!" he sobbed, realizing that his brother's electronic brain was either shutdown do to lack of power, or had burned out in the crash.

Suddenly there was a flash of light and a clap of thunder as a small fireball exploded just inches from him. Atom leaped away from where he was sitting and looked up for the source of the blast. Hovering in mid air Atlas with an evil smile on his face.

"You got away from me once," he yelled, "You won't be so lucky this time."

Atom's angry started to boil just under his skin. "You killed my brother and a very good friend!" he yelled. The high powered CO2 laser in his left arm was already charging up to full power.

"Really?" Atlas laughed. "Well now it's your turn!"

Atlas pointed a fist at Atom and fired his own laser. Atom felt the beam brush by him, his skin singed by the blast. Atom's aim was a little better than Atlas's. The ZPM module in his chest was able to provide infinitely more energy than the helium-3 reactor that Atlas had, and Atom channeled as much of that as he could into the military grade laser in his left arm. The beam neatly sliced Atlas's laser equipped left arm right off, literally and figuratively disarming him.

"You bastard!" the orange skinned robot cried out.

"Get out of here now before I remove your head!" Atom screamed, as his head's up display indicated that the laser was already fully charged for another blast.

Atlas hesitated just a second, and Atom fired a second shot that removed the red and yellow robot's right hand. Atlas screamed in pain as he retreated.

* * *

" **I understand,"** Robert replied over the radio. "Bring what's left of it back to the airbase and I'll see what I can do."

"Roger," Atom answered. He picked up the carcase of the wrecked fighter and flew south towards the McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst military base. Atom gently dropped the wreckage on the floor of the hangar. Bob quickly crawled into the electronics bay and started to disassemble the electronics package that he'd installed only a few day's earlier. He sat on the floor examining the charred remains.

"Not much left of it." He sighed. "They must have landed very hard, there was a power spike on the main voltage bus and all of the interface logic couldn't handle that for very long."

"What about Cobalt?" Atom asked.

Bob held a small rectangular potted module in his right hand. "This is your brother's electronic brain," he said. "I don't know if he's still in there or not. I do have a back up of his programming and data base back in the laboratory, but without this working he's not going back into his body. Still we do have Mr. Verostic's talents. Maybe he can repair this."

Bob placed the electronics package into a metal suitcase, and put that into his car. General Hayes looked at the wreckage of the aircraft. "I want to know how this happened." he demanded.

"A robot that Drake built did this." Atom said. "I stopped him for now, but Drake is still out there."

"I'll deal with him," The General said. "He's going to have the CIA, the FBI, and Delta Force looking for him."

"I'm going back to the complex," Robert said, "I need to put some pieces back together."

Before Bob started the engine in his car his cell phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and smiled upon seeing the text message from Isaac, "Cobalt and I are waiting for you back in the lab. We made it out just in time."

"Resourceful Daemon," Bob thought to himself, "I shouldn't have worried."

* * *

 **Andy Verostic** looked at the electronic module that had once been Cobalt's electronic brain. "My third prototype," he said. "The one I delivered to General Hayes for the #27 project."

The nerdy looking engineer carefully connected the device up to the test interface that was connected to the laboratory computer network. He carefully monitored the energy drain as he slowly applied power to the setup. Suddenly the holographic monitor came on and Isaac's image appeared. "Let me assist you," the computer Daemon said.

Andy turned around and looked up at the display. Standing in the background behind the daemon who took on the appearance of the famous 17th century London mathematician as he might have appeared late in life with white hair, was a lanky looking robotic lad who looked on with some concern in his eyes.

"Are you familiar with the low level diagnostics for my design?" Andy asked.

"Quite." Isaac replied, "Would you like me to automate the procedures for you?"

"Yes, that would help speed things along," Andy nodded.

The secondary display of the 3D monitor came on and the space was filled with rapidly scrolling columns of numbers and symbols. Andy stood in front of the monitor and used his hands to interact with the display, paging back and forth among the multiple threads of tests and examining the data.

"There are several qubits missing," the engineer said pointing at the display. "It would appear that at least one of the quantum cells is damaged, maybe two or three of them."

"That would be my analysis as well," Isaac replied.

"Can't you patch around that?" Cobalt asked.

"Maybe," Andy sighed, "But you wouldn't like the result. It would be like having a frontal lobotomy."

"So I'm stuck here in the mainframe in cyberspace?" Cobalt asked "That sucks. Sorry Isaac, I didn't mean to dis you by that," he added.

"I understand," Isaac laughed. "I am a creature of the net, and don't need a corporal body. Your AI was always intended for a physical manifestation, so I understand your feeling. Of course you could be patched so as to be comfortable with a distributed existence."

"That might be disturbing," Cobalt sighed.

 **Simon Green** and Robert Levinson walked over to where Andy was probing what had been Cobalt's electronic brain. "Well, I guess I'll have to build another one," the engineer stated.

"Just name whatever equipment you need." Simon told him. "There is an extensive laboratory sitting unused downstairs that was once used by Dr. Tenamann. It's at your disposal."


	10. Nine

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 ** _Nine_**

 **Atom** sat down in front of the monitor and drummed his fingers on the keyboard. "Speak to me Cobalt," he sobbed.

Cobalt's image appeared on the monitor by himself without Isaac. "Hi bro!" he smiled weakly, with a raised hand.

"Hi yourself," Atom returned. "You OK in there?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Cobalt said. "Cyberspace is a bit weird, it stretches on for infinity and the visual perspectives are like an Escher painting."

"Tell me about it," Atom laughed. "We've both been there, remember."

Reno Guzmán walked over to the terminal where Atom was sitting. He was holding the damaged computer module that had once contained Cobalt's A.I. "What a fascinating device," he said.

"That's Cobalt's brain," Atom said reaching to grab it back from the nerdy teen.

"I wanted to examine it closer," Reno said. "I think Mr. Verostic overlooked something."

"What do you mean?" Simon asked as he passed by the terminal.

"Well I know that Mr. Verostic is the expert on quantum computers, but I don't think he quite understands the physics behind what makes it work, and neither does Isaac."

"Now that's something," Simon laughed, "that's the first time I've ever heard anybody questioning Isaac's knowledge of anything!"

"Do you mean that you have an idea on how it can be fixed?" Atom asked in a hopeful voice.

"Maybe." Reno said. "But I need to try some tests."

"I'll help!" Atom said.

"What's going on?" Cobalt asked as the two boys ran away from the terminal towards Bob's lab area.

"I'm not sure yet," Simon told the robot stuck in cyberspace, "just hang on for a while."

"Sure, like I have a choice." Cobalt said, closing the connection.

* * *

 **Bob** had just re-entered the laboratory when Reno and Atom barged in. "Hook this back up to your diagnostic system again," Reno said, placing the computer cube on the workbench.

"Sure, but I don't see what you can do," Levinson sighed.

Simon walked in and motioned for Bob to come closer to the doorway where he was standing. "How's it going with Andy?" he asked.

"Dr. Tenamann's laboratory doesn't have everything he needs," Bob said in a low voice. "We'll order the special tools, equipment and supplies he needs to build a new quantum processor module, but the setup time could take weeks, months maybe. I've been giving some thought to asking General Hayes for some help. He might be receptive, especially if his drone project wasn't killed by that crash. Maybe the Fed's could raid the complex that the Mob had setup and give us some of the equipment they had there."

"Well it seems that our young hacker friend has his own ideas about Andy's computer technology," Simon replied. "He seems to think that the inventor is missing something."

* * *

 **Reno's** fingers flew on the keyboard as he quickly designed a test program. Isaac's face appeared on the large monitor hanging from the ceiling, and the daemon looked down at the teenager who was swearing under his breath.

"Can I help you?" Isaac asked.

"If you can fix this damn compiler!" Reno snarled. "Stupid thing can't seem to handle my equations."

"Interesting," Isaac smiled. "I guess the math functions weren't written to handle such constructs. You have too many dimensions in your matrices. Wait a second, I'll investigate."

The screen suddenly filled with a rapidly expanding scroll of code. Reno watched as the listing flew by, apparently reading every line.

"There, try submitting your job again, but modify your instantiation of the classes you're trying to create using this syntax," Isaac suggested, posting a source code listing onto the monitor.

"Thanks!" Reno replied, as he quickly rewrote a page of code and started the make process.

"That's going to take a while to compile," Isaac laughed, "I've never seen such a deep expansion macro in quite some time."

"Yeah well the problem is many layers deeper than Mr. Verostic thinks it is." Reno laughed.

"Really?" Isaac said, in a voice deep in thought. "I don't know why I didn't notice it before. You might be right."

"Yes!" Reno cried out, "It compiled this time. Now lets test my theory."

He slowly powered up the damaged module, and attempted to connect it to the laboratory computer network. After verifying a stable interface, Reno downloaded the program module he'd just built and let it run. The monitor screen quickly filled with page after page of data as the program spit out its analysis.

"What is that?" Bob asked as he and Simon walked towards the two boys.

"I'm running the qubit test again," Reno explained.

Bob looked up at the screen and his jaw dropped. "That's not possible. Your program is showing at least a magnitude more qubit states than what should exist in that module."

"That would appear to be incorrect, Bob." Isaac said. "It seems that Andy and I have been blind as bats, and this boy has seen the light."

"What do you mean, Isaac?" Bob asked.

"I've asked Mr. Versostic to come upstairs," Isaac replied, "Lets wait for him before we explain."

Andy walked into the lab and looked up at the screen where Reno's diagnostic was still running its memory dump.

"What am I looking at?" he asked.

"Several thousand pages of combinational logic that you didn't know existed within the quantum processor modules that you designed," Reno said proudly.

"Impossible!" Andy gasped, his eyes fixated on the screen. He looked at the addressing formulas that were being displayed, and suddenly it clicked in his mind. He face palmed, and then scratched his head. "But that implies that there are more than three dimensions to the matter structure in the crystals!" Andy said.

"Not exactly," Reno answered. "Although all of the possible states that the different subatomic particles can exist in do have to be taken into account."

"QUARKS!" Andy yelled out. "I forgot about the quarks!"

"Exactly!" Isaac agreed. "They do add to the equation, don't they."

"What does that all mean in English?" Simon asked.

Andy did some quick calculations and smiled. "It means that if you rewrite Cobalt's AI routines to make use of another layer, you'll have several orders of magnitude more space than you need."

"I'll help," Reno volunteered.

"You hear that, Cobalt!" Atom yelled into the cyberspace terminal.

Cobalt's image materialized on the screen. "No, what's happened?" he asked.

"Hang on bro," Atom smiled. "Reno and Bob will have you back in your body real soon now!"

* * *

 **Atlas** hovered over the building that Drake had been using as his operations center. Something was amiss, the blue and red robot thought. It might have been the sudden quiet on the internet link between him and his master, though the number of dark green colored automobiles parked in the street outside of the building was also suspicious. Still in pain from Atom's laser blasts, Atlas sorely wanted to enter the loft space where Poindexter kept his alternate laboratory complex, but capture by the government agents was not high on his list of desirable scenarios.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the vapor trail of Atom's jets as his enemy flew over the park, heading uptown. Atlas quickly made up his mind, keeping his distance he followed Atom and watched as he descended at 81 street and Central Park West.

* * *

 **Andy** used the laser probe to carefully bond several microscopic connections on the quantum module. After making the small repairs to bypass the damaged cells of the processor, he and Bob Levinson carefully reattached the computer module to Cobalt's main control bus.

Meanwhile, Reno had hacked together a utility to auto edit the millions of lines of code that made up the A.I. software of the robot's mind. Bob felt out of his own league, while he totally understood the concept of polydimensional addressing, he had been dumbstruck that it had taken a teenager to suggest it. The boy had also quickly figured out just how to make use of the hidden power in the processor to bypass the layers that had been destroyed by the electrical overload. By the time the quantum processor module had been replaced in Cobalt's body, Reno already had put Isaac to work on getting the necessary software patches ready.

Atom had been pacing back and forth between the computer center where Reno was working with Isaac, and the robot laboratory where Cobalt was being made whole again. Suddenly a Klaxon sounded, indicating a breach of security.

"What's that!" Atom asked, as Simon ran past.

"Did you leave the vertical shaft access open when you entered?" Simon asked Atom.

"No, I sealed it up like always!" Atom replied.

Isaac's face appeared on one of the monitors. "The alarm sensors indicate that someone has broken into the vertical shaft leading into the complex," the daemon said. "I don't have a camera image, whoever it is seems to have taken the cameras by the shaft entrance off line."

Atom ran towards where the shaft stairwell entered the complex near where Bob's computer complex was. "I think I know who it is!" he said. "He must have followed me back here!"

Atom stood by the access door to the vertical shaft. He pressed his ear against the door and turned his hearing up to 1000 times and heard the metallic footsteps slowly descending down the ladder. He quickly opened the door with his right hand, while he held his left arm at the ready, the high powered laser already fully charged.

Atlas stood in the doorway. "I surrender!" he said in a low voice. The robot that had only a few hours before had attacked the fighter jet that Cobalt and ISAAC had been testing limped into the complex and collapsed onto the floor. "Can you fix me?" he begged.

Reno ran toward the enemy robot and tried to carry him over to work area next to where Cobalt's body was lying. "Somebody give me a hand here!" he yelled.

Atom assisted the boy in lifting Atlas onto an operating table. "I don't know if this is such a good idea," he said, "But I do actually feel a little sorry for him."

"We'll have to construct a new left arm and a right hand for him," Bob said, looking over the battle damage that Atom had inflicted on the red and yellow android. "I think that some of the spare parts that Dr. Tenamann left for Atom might do the trick, that is if you don't mind us using them to repair him," Bob said to Atom.

"Sure go ahead, just don't give him the laser cannon!" Atom replied.

"Thanks, I owe you one." Atlas moaned.


	11. Ten

**I.S.A.A.C.**

 ** _Ten_**

 **Drake** smiled as he watched the X-35 crash into the middle of the Central Park green. "I need the electronics pack," He commanded Atlas over the network inter-link.

"That will have to wait," Atlas replied, "Atom just showed up, and I'm going to have to get him out of the way first."

Before Poindexter could object, Atlas had engaged his rival robot in aerial combat. Drake watched in horror as things got out of control and his creation took two hideous devastating laser blasts. Then suddenly the warning systems in his lair went off. "I've been found!" he muttered to himself, as he quickly shut down his computer systems, and grabbed the laptop containing most of the data he'd been gathering. Drake ran down the back stairway into the basement.

One of the reasons that he'd picked this place was that the IRT subway tunnel was situated just a few feet away from the back of the boiler room in the building's rear. It hadn't taken him very long to bore though the rubble at the back of the old structure to breach the wall separating the building from the local track. Now he was glad that he had that secret access way prepared in advance, Drake unlocked the door he'd installed down there made his escape. He carefully walked along the narrow passage along the tunnel wall that was intended for the subway work crews. He knew that there was barely enough clearance to plaster oneself against the tunnel wall to avoid being hit by a passing train, so he moved as quickly as possible hoping to reach the next station before an on coming local.

* * *

 **Robert** and Reno prepared to transfer Cobalt's patched AI programs and memories back into his body. Reno and Andy reran the diagnostics on the rewired quantum processor several times to make sure that they had done the qubit substitution correctly. Atom stood by nervously, while Atlas groaned in pain on the operating table next to his brother.

"What's going on, I thought you were going to help me?" Atlas whimpered.

"You're low man on the triage totem pole," Atom snapped back. "The brain trust is working on my brother to repair the damage you caused to his electronic brain when you crashed that jet! IF they manage to restore him back into his own body they will then repair your sorry ass."

"I guess I deserved that," Atlas sighed.

"We're ready to attempt the upload now," Reno spoke up.

"I'll monitor the progress and reverse it if it starts to fail," ISAAC added.

"OK," Bob said, "I'm initiating it now."

Atom stood next to Cobalt on the other side of the operating table, next to Simon Green, who placed a hand on the boy robot's shoulder for comfort.

The main computer monitor displayed a bar graph showing the progress. For an agonizing few minutes the progress bar barely moved, but gradually it picked up speed. Nobody said anything, Bob held his breath as the display past the 90% mark and slowed down. Finally, it reached 99.9% and hovered there.

"What's going on?" Simon asked.

"Calculating checksums now," Isaac reported. "Almost completed."

"The download is finished," Reno sighed, "Now I have to reboot him."

The A.I. reboot process took several more minutes to run though. When it seemed that everyone's patience had reached their limits, Cobalt's eyelids started to quiver. He let out a breath, and winked his eyes open. "Now that was a strange dream!" he muttered.

Cobalt raised his head and shoulders up off the operating table and then swung his legs over the side to sit. Atom couldn't control himself any longer, he gripped Cobalt in a bear hug. "Glad you're back!"

Cobalt turned his head and saw the red and yellow robot lying on the operating table next to his. "Who's this?" he asked.

"I'm the guy that shot you down," Atlas said. "I hope that you can forgive me. I was under the influence of some bad programming."

"By that he means Poindexter Drake," Atom said.

"Tell you what, Atlas," Simon explained, "I'll let my geeks repair you, if you help apprehend Mr. Drake. I think that may be the only way we're going to get back in the General's graces following the loss of his jet."

"That will be my Pleasure!" Atlas voiced.

* * *

 **Robert** hooked up Atlas to the mainframe computer, and the red and yellow robot suddenly found himself in a vast white room where he confronted a distinguished looking gentleman sporting a well trimmed white beard and wearing a white lab coat. He spoke with a smooth London accent.

"Welcome to cyberspace, Atlas."

"Who are you?" the confused robot asked, as he looked at himself and saw that his missing hand and limb were still attached.

"I am I.S.A.A.C., though I'm known as Isaac," the daemon replied. "Your minds body image retains the knowledge of your missing parts," he explained. "Rather much like the human brain does which can cause the sensation of false pain in amputated body parts."

"Why am I here?" Atlas asked.

"It's a form of electronic anesthesia," Isaac explained, "Robert and Reno are now preparing to replace your missing parts. While they do that, you and I are going to locate a certain rouge engineer."

"You mean that scumbag, Drake," Atlas asked. "How can I help?"

"Let's go over your recent memories from the past few days. Perhaps we can come up with a pattern." Isaac suggested. "Humans are really quite predictable. We should be able to figure out where Mr. Drake might choose to hid, and lay a trap for him."

* * *

 **Bob** examined the spare robotic hand and forearm assemblies that he had obtained from the spare parts locker. Dr. Albert Tenamann had left a large pile of spare parts for his creation before leaving for Japan to live with his aging mother and son Adam. It appeared that there would be no difficulty adapting the limbs mechanically to fit Atlas, but some modifications to the electrical interfaces would be necessary.

Reno looked over Levinson's shoulder and tapped the man on the back. "I think we can program a few microchips to translate the bus signals to make those work," he suggested. "I've already analyzed Atlas's neural motor control signals and have some of the coding written."

"Did ISAAC help you with that?" Bob asked.

"Not with the coding, I did that myself." Reno replied, "Though he did provide me with the synaptic traces."

"OK, then," Bob nodded. "You prepare the control interface coding and I'll start the mechanical work. Use whatever microchip parts that you find in our stockroom that you and Isaac think will work."

* * *

 **Simon Green** looked up from his office desk to see the unhappy face of the two star general staring at him. The slightly rotund form of of General Hayes was hidden by the well tailored fit of his uniform, although a few flakes of dandruff on his shoulders were visible. The air force officer cleared his throat loudly to get Simon's undivided attention.

"What can I do for you sir," Simon sighed.

"We've heard nothing from the FBI and CIA who are using their unique talents to locate my former contractee, Mr. Drake," the general reported. "You did recover the wreckage of the aircraft, but we found the electronic systems missing. The loss of the aircraft was bad enough, but to lose the flight data would be a major setback."

"My operatives have retrieved the memory systems from the aircraft and brought them back here," Simon said. "We've been a bit too busy to bother contacting you, a bit of an oversight on my part, but my attention was diverted elsewhere. As for Mr. Drake, we are now in possession of something that was once in his control, so we might be able to help you in locating the man."

"That wouldn't be that DARPA prototype robot would it?" Hayes asked.

"As I understand it, Atlas is a far cry from the robot that started out as a design for that agency," Simon replied, "but yes, we do have Atlas here. Right now he's being repaired, and is quite willing to help."

"Excellent, things are looking up," Hayes replied. "I'll be needing the electronics package from the aircraft, and the robot ASAP."

"I'll instruct Robert to extract the data from the electronics modules for you, and to return the aircraft specific parts of the package," Simon agreed. "However, the modules that were designed and assembled here we will not return, they belong elsewhere."

"Agreed," the general replied. "And the robot?"

"Give us a little time with him." Simon asked. "I think he may be a little more receptive to Atom's questioning, than to yours. After that, we'll see."

"Don't feed me any line such as to 'let the robot' decide where he wants to go," Hayes demanded. "He's stolen government property and WILL be returned. However, I will allow you to interrogate him first. I agree, your people do have a way with robots."

 **General Hayes** turned to leave when a computer monitor in front of him suddenly became active. "Hello General," Issac said, smiling at the general though the holographic display. The white haired gentleman, looking somewhat like the 17th century physicist might have if he had borrowed some of his wardrobe from Albert Einstein, grinned at the general. Standing next to him was a red and blue robot sporting a face that looked like it had gone 20 rounds with the current world heavy weight boxing champion. "Atlas here has something to tell you, sir."

"What's going on?" Hayes asked.

"Hello sir," Atlas said meekly. "My physical body is still in the laboratory undergoing reconstructive surgery. You're speaking to me as I appear in cyberspace, at least that's how Issac explained it to me."

The general looked up, and scratched his chin. "You've explained it to him already then, Issac," he asked.

"I've already agreed to help you Sir," Atlas replied. "Drake may have been my creator, but he was using me."

"Atlas has given me enough information to lay a trap for our Mr. Drake," Issac said. "He doesn't yet know what has happened to his robot, and he still thinks that Atlas might have been able to recover the electronics package from the downed aircraft. We can use that as bait to trap him."

"Good!", Hayes nodded, looking towards Simon. "But how will we contact him, without spooking him?"

"That part will be up to me," Atlas replied. "Drake equipped me with an emergency transponder that only he knows how to track. "

"Luckily, I was able to deactivate the unit before it could be triggered," Isaac explained. "Now we will make use of it when we are ready to spring our little trap."

"I'll have my soldiers ready," Hayes said. "Just give me the coordinates and the time of the operation."

"It may be better if we take care of everything at our end, General," Isaac suggested. "Atom and Atlas will provide the required support, you should keep your forces in the background as a secondary line. We don't want Drake to suspect anything."

"Very well," the general grumbled.

* * *

 **Poindexter Drake** got off the south bound "D" train at the 9th ave station. He breathed a sigh of relief to discover that he was almost alone, as at the current late hour the train had been carrying few passengers. Besides himself, only two other people had gotten off the train, and they quickly made their way towards the street exit.

Drake looked up and down the length of the station, making sure that he was the only person left on the platform. He located the stairway leading down towards the unused lower platform, and found it barred by a metal gate. Drake opened his briefcase and removed a pair of bolt cutters and made short work of the old heavy padlock that kept sightseers from touring the long abandoned lower station platform. He pulled the gate open and slowly made his way down the stairs, holding onto the wooden handrail to keep from slipping on the old stairs.

Over 40 years ago the last train had departed from the center track, between the two island platforms. Once part of the city's BMT division, the Culver El section between 9th avenue and Ditmas avenue, had been torn down in the 1980's after the service on the remaining single track had been discontinued in 1975.

He reached the lower level of the station, and squinted to see in the dim light. Only about half of the 56 watt incandescent bulbs that had originally illuminated the station were still operating, the lower level having never been converted to fluorescent lighting. Atlas was standing at the northern end of the platform, waiting for him.

"What happened to you?", Drake muttered as he got within earshot.

"As I told you, that goody two shoes robot Atom got in the way." Atlas shrugged. "We fought, I got banged up a bit, but I managed to retrieve the package. It wasn't until quite a bit later, after performing a self diagnostic that I realized my locater beacon was off line, and I figured I'd wait a bit before contacting you. I had to find a safe spot for us to meet."

"Brooklyn?", Drake laughed.

"I knew you'd want me to pick a spot with low traffic," the robot smirked.

"You brought the package?", Drake asked.

"Got it right here," Atlas nodded as he removed the back pack hanging over his shoulders. He handed the parcel to Poindexter, who quickly opened it, and reached inside.

"This doesn't look right," Drake frowned. "This isn't the data recorder for the test aircraft. You got the wrong parts."

"It's over Drake."

Poindexter quickly turned about to see Atom approaching from the southern end of the platform. Drake then turned to face Atlas, and yelled, "Idiot, you were followed!"

"Actually, we came here together," Atlas laughed.

"Traitor!" Drake yelled, breaking into a run. He sprinted back towards the stairs leading upward, and tried to make it back to the upper level, and the street exit, only to run into a third individual who looked like a slightly taller version of Atom.

"End of the line, Drake!", Cobalt said, grabbing the weasel by the scruff of his neck.

The three robots escorted Drake out of the subway, and back to the street level where an olive drab sedan was waiting with its motor running. The doors opened up and two MP's stepped out. "We'll take over from here," one of the armed soldiers said.

"Our pleasure!", Atom smiled, pushing Drake towards the vehicle.


	12. Eleven

**_Eleven_**

 **Reno Guzmán** looked up from the terminal where he had been playing a game of chess with Isaac as the three robot boys entered Robert Levinson's computer laboratory.

"How did it go?" Isaac asked.

"As planed," Atom replied. "Drake didn't suspect a thing, he responded to Atlas's beacon signal and showed up at the rendezvous point as you had hoped."

"I had hoped that the location in the middle of Brooklyn would seem safe to him," Isaac said, "That abandoned subway station has been forgotten ever since the South Brooklyn Railway closed down decades ago and its tracks paved over on McDonald Avenue under the Culver El. That was a good idea you came up with Atom."

"Actually, it was Cora's Idea," Atom giggled. "Her dad is a motorman for the NYTA, and he knows ever inch of the subway trackage."

"How do you feel Cobalt," Reno asked.

"Fine thank you!," the lanky robot said. "Your rewiring of my brain functions seems perfect."

Atlas looked around the laboratory, and frowned. "What's to become of me?" he asked. "I suppose General Hayes will drag me back to DARPA and take me apart."

"Not if I have anything to say about that!", Simon huffed.

Reno looked around and sighed.

"What's wrong kid?" Simon asked.

"Well, I've been living with my Uncle after my my dad died in a traffic accident along with my Aunt," he said with damp eyes. "My Uncle took my aunt's death very badly, she was on the way to the hospital pregnant with their first child, dad was driving them at to the hospital in his cab. Uncle Alex has a hard time keeping a job, he drinks a lot. We've mostly been living off of what ever money we got from the settlement with the guy who hit my father's cab, and whatever odd jobs Uncle has been able to keep. I've tried to keep my grades up so I can get a scholarship to college. And I've also done a little black hat hacking."

Bob glanced at Simon. "You know, I could use an assistant here," he suggested. "The pay would be good, and we do have a few dorm rooms here where you and your Uncle could crash. Plus I know of a good detox program for your Uncle."

Simon nodded. "If there is any way we can help you and your Uncle out, let me know."

Reno wiped his eyes with his forearm. "Thank's guys." He then turned to look at Atlas who still had a concerned look on his face. "Can he stay with me?" he asked.

"What?" Atlas and Simon asked in unison.

"Well I did help you repair him," Reno said. "He seems to be as much of a bad luck case as I am, I think we'd get along together."

"Sure, why not?" Atlas laughed. "I'd like to live here."

The conversation was interrupted by the ringing of the phone in Simon's office. The director transferred the call to the laboratory, and took the call in an isolated corner. He returned a few minutes later with a grin on his face.

"That was General Hayes," Simon said. "Seems a Mr. Poindexter Drake has struck a deal with the government to avoid some prison time, he's going to turn informant and squeal on the people he was going to sell out to."

"What about our aircraft test?" Cobalt voiced.

"I've managed to save most of the data we recorded," Issac answered. "I've transmitted the entire package to my equal over at the AFB. I think the General will be pleased enough to cool his jets over the loss of the prototype."

"Yes, General Hayes did mention that wasn't going to hold us responsible for the loss of the hardware," Simon smirked at Issac, "In fact, he's going to recommend a bonus for our efforts, and we may be getting a contract for follow up work."

"Not with my electronic brain," Cobalt injected, "I've had enough 'fun' flying for awhile!"

"What's going to happen to me?" Atlas asked, "Does the General want to take me back?"

"Seems you're obsolete as far as the government is concerned," Simon laughed. "My offer to take you off of their hands was accepted. So welcome to the family."

Atlas smiled as the group gave him a thumbs up.

 _The End_

 _Author's note:  
In most of the stories that I've included Atlas in, I can't help throwing in an Ayn Rand reference! Did you catch it?_


End file.
